MLAS Course Roster

 

Fall 2008 Courses

 

MLAS 260-15

Original Genius: Art Profiles and Politics

Professor Robert Mode
Location: 206 Old Gym Building
Days and Time: Wednesday evenings 6:30 - 9:00
First class: September 2

Course Description:
This course is one of the options for those students following the Creative Arts MLAS (certificate program).

The imaginative “genius” is pictured as an isolated individual, caught up in the fury of inspiration. Yet, artists inhabit social worlds where both traditional and innovative forces shape their development. A number of questions arise, such as how artists maintain the integrity of their unique vision while pursuing success, or what strategies counter their impulsive behavior.

Social and political forces affect each artist’s life, so this course sets out to reveal the basis for personal profiling that writers (and now filmmakers) use to highlight artistic genius.

From Da Vinci to contemporary icons such as Pollock and Warhol, our class will pursue the various manifestations of this genius.
Issues of gender stereotyping will arise, such as how Mexico’s Diego Rivera was revered as a bold, inspired artist-- while his wife Frida Kahlo was only portrayed as “gifted” after her death.

Special attention will be given to Van Gogh and Picasso, who set the standard for disturbed and brilliantly eccentric genius which remains the source of fascination in today’s popular culture.

Course Instructor:
Robert Mode is associate professor and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of History of Art. A frequent speaker to Vanderbilt audiences, he received the Alumni Education Award in 2006. His many papers and articles have dealt with artists from Renaissance to modern times, including Michelangelo and an array of western artists from the 18th to 20th centuries. He has conducted programs in Florence and London, while leading professional organizations and chairing national conferences within his field.

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MLAS 290-02

Crossroads of the World: The Panama Canal

Professor W. Frank Robinson
Location: 206 Buttrick Hall
Days and Time: Monday evenings 6:30 – 9:00
First class: September 1


Course Description:
This Core Seminar is required of all newly admitted MLAS students. Those students admitted for the 2008-2009 Academic Year will follow a 30 credit- hour degree requirement, which entails the Core Seminar as one of their initial courses and the Capstone Seminar as one of the final courses in the program. Other MLAS students may enroll in this course contingent upon sufficient space.

This core seminar will focus on the Panama Canal, providing a context and a lens through which to examine the following: the history of Spanish America and Central America, United States-Latin American relations, maritime commerce, the engineering marvels of the canal’s excavation and lock design/operation, the medical and scientific struggle against malaria and yellow fever, the migration of Afro-West Indians to Panama for the railroad and canal, life for North Americans in the Canal Zone, and, in a larger context, lessons that speak to the geopolitics between small and powerful nations.
This multi-disciplinary course will show that the construction of the Panama Canal, along with being an unprecedented feat of engineering, was a profoundly important historic event with worldwide repercussions. It affected the lives of people at every level of society and of virtually every race and nationality.

Course Instructor:
W. Frank Robinson is an Assistant Professor of History and the Associate Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Vanderbilt University. He teaches courses in the Atlantic World and Latin American and Caribbean history that cover both the colonial and national periods including the history of the Iberian Atlantic empires, modern Latin America, Central America, and the contemporary Caribbean. His research interests include twentieth century political and social movements, nationalism and populism, and Caribbean Diaspora communities. Professor Robinson is currently completing a manuscript that examines twentieth century Panamanian political history.

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MLAS 260-72

Setting the Stage: Design for the Theatre

Professor Phillip Franck
Location: 203 Neely Auditorium
Days and Time: Thursday evenings 6:30 – 9:00
First Class: September 4

Course Description:
This course is one of the options for those students following the Creative Arts MLAS (certificate program).

In this course, we will explore the nature of theatrical design and how design works in the context of the play text. We will discuss the elements and principles of stage design and explore the process through which designers make their choices. There will be several projects over the course of the semester which will allow you to make choices of your own for scenes or situations. Because it’s important to see design choices in context, the class will attend several productions on campus and around Nashville. For each of these you will write a brief critique of the design elements and their appropriateness to the play and its production. By the end of the term, you will be a more informed theatergoer able to evaluate design choices and their impact on productions.

Readings include selections from the books below:
J. Michael Gillette, Theatrical Design and Production
Rosemary Ingham, From Page to Stage
Robert Edmund Jones, The Dramatic Imagination

Course Instructor:
Phillip Franck is an Associate Professor of Theatre, as well as Chair of the department.  He serves as Scenic, Lighting, and Audio designer for all VUTheatre productions.  Phillip maintains a professional career, primarily as a Lighting designer, both for professional (Tennessee Rep, Nashville Opera) and academic theatres (Whitman College).  Phillip holds an MFA in Theatrical Design from Northwestern University. 

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MLAS 260-76

Southern Literature

Professor Michael Kreyling
Location: 201 Buttrick Hall
Days and Time: Tuesday evenings 6:30 – 9:00
First class: September 2

Course Description:
This course is one of the options for those students following the Creative Arts MLAS (certificate program).

A survey of some of the perennial and upstart issues in Southern Literature. The format is seminar, which means that for each meeting beginning a week or two into the semester, I’ll require each of you to prepare a plan for presenting and discussing provocative issues in the interpretation of each text. This is not as onerous as it may sound because I will probably interrupt you all along the way. But, oral presentation is part of the training of graduate students for professional careers. The other part is the production of a project in professional writing. This can range from full-bore critical research to the kind of essay you might find in a national magazine. See Christopher Dickey’s cover essay in Newsweek (August 11, 2008) – something like that with a medium to heavy dose of the lit-talk we do in the seminar. 10 pages/around 2000 words; 3000 max. Due Dec. 12.

I think it might be best to start with To Kill a Mockingbird, still one of the most widely known novels of southern literature, easily available, not too long. You’ve probably already read it:

September 2: “Problems with To Kill a Mockingbird?” Nobody doesn’t like Scout, Jem, and Atticus. But Atticus doesn’t win the acquittal of Tom Robinson, passes on the solution of southern racism to his children, and echoes the rhetoric of southern resistance to desegregation in his summation to the jury. Are we missing something? The film, produced by Gregory Peck and starring him, can’t be left out of the discussion either. What’s in the novel that is not in the film? If you could come to class on 9/2/08 ready to discuss, that would be a great way to get started with momentum.

September 9 and 16: “Fear of Faulkner.” If Oprah can make Faulkner novels part of her reading program for the summer of 2005, so can we. How to read The Sound and the Fury. There are several pages of Oprah/Faulkner via www.google.com. And you can get to some at www.oprah.com. I’m curious to see if we can read “Oprah” reading Faulkner. Let’s begin by just reading The Sound and the Fury. Just read it: whatever sticks, sticks; whatever doesn’t, doesn’t. Then the next week we’ll go back and see what help Oprah can be.

September 23, 30, and October 7: “Gone With the Wind, Sequels and Parodies.” As of this date there are two authorized sequels, one book-length parody (with lawsuits), a satire by Carol Burnett, a black photo spread in Vanity Fair, a stage version in London – and that’s not all I know about. What is (was) GWTW and why do we love to hate it? This might take a few weeks. Read GWTW. Even if you think you know it, at least graze through it again. Watching the movie is a pretty good substitute, but you’ll be surprised when we do a comparison of what’s in the novel but not in the film. There are two authorized sequels, Alexandra Ripley’s Scarlett, and Donald McCaig’s Rhett Butler’s People; and Alice Randall’s parody, The Wind Done Gone. I’m not proposing each of us reads all of this stuff. What I am proposing is this: everyone reads all or as much of the original as you can, and then ONE of the others. I want to make sure that at least one of us reads each of the three “spinoffs” so that our discussion can be balanced.

October 21 (or 28 if Fall Break covers this date): “Homage to Fugitives and Agrarians: Poets and Culture Warriors of the 1920s and 1930s.” There is a fertile mixture of legend and fact swirling around these two semi-distinct groups and their issues. We should take at least one class meeting to try to sort it out. The Fugitives is the name they (some faculty, townies, and undergraduates) gave to themselves in the 1920s when they met to read their poems. They called themselves Agrarians in 1930 when they published the essays on social policy in I’ll Take My Stand. We’ll read some of both, and try to reconstruct the original context and answer questions about where they ought to be placed in our southern thinking in the 21st century.

November 4: If we can concentrate on Election Day, we’ll discuss“St. Flannery.” Can reading the right writer save your miserable soul? We should look at O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood and maybe a few short stories and test them for depth of religious meaning.

November 11 and 18: An early start to Eudora Welty’s (1909-2001) centennial celebrations. Since many of the official celebrations of Welty will feature her photographic work and her fiction, we will too. Since Welty herself packaged photographs and short stories early in her career in the 1930s, we will explore the connections. The two-volume Library of America edition is excellent. I want us to read and discuss her autobiographical memoir, One Writer’s Beginnings, and the late novel that parallels it, The Optimist’s Daughter. Trouble is, they are not in the same volume of the LofA edition. Both are readily available in paperback.

December 2: “21st Century Southern America: Deliverance and Garden & Gun.” James Dickey’s (Vanderbilt M.A. 1950) novel is a modern classic about the shock of impact between the rural past and the suburban present in the South. The new magazine Garden & Gun is another. Can we understand one better by comparing it to the other?

December 9: Final meeting. Location TBA. Individual presentations and peer discussion.

Course Instructor:
Michael Kreyling, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English, has been a member of the Vanderbilt English Department since 1985. He is the author of six books, three on Eudora Welty and two on Southern Literature in general. His sixth book is on the crime fiction novelist Ross Macdonald, and was in the works when he taught his last MLAS course on the American Detective Novel.

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MLAS 260 74

Why Write? Perspectives on Literary Creativity

Professor Kate Daniels
Location: 201 Buttrick Hall
Days and Time: Thursday evenings 6:30 – 9:00
First Class: September 4

Course Overview:
This course is one of the options for those students following the Creative Arts MLAS (certificate program).

Why do people write poems, novels, and short stories? What is the cross-cultural urge to express oneself creatively in written language all about? What is the function of the literary imagination in individual lives as well as in human culture, overall? In this class students will attempt to answer some of these questions by exploring three current approaches to understanding literary creativity. Our focus will be on theories taken from the realms of psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and aesthetics.

During the second half of the semester, students will hear from writers, themselves, about why they write and how they imagine the relationship of their “selves” to the texts they create. Classroom visits by fiction writers and poets will be coordinated with specific readings. We will explore ideas about illness and writing; memory and writing; the politics of writing; gender and writing; confinement and writing; place and writing; the figure of the muse; and other topics as they arise from our discussion.

Course Instructor:
Kate Daniels is author of three volumes of poetry, including The Niobe Poems and her most recent work, Four Testimonies: Poems. Her first volume, The White Wave was awarded the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for Poetry.   She has her M.F.A. from Columbia University .  She has won the James Dickey Prize for Poetry from Five Points: A Journal of Literature and Art and the Louisiana Literature Prize for Poetry from Southeastern Louisiana University . Her poems have been anthologized in a number of publications and have appeared in journals such as American Poetry Review, Critical Quarterly, and the Southern Review.   She has also edited a volume of poems by Muriel Rukeyser and co-edited the book Of Solitude and Silence: Writings on Robert Bly.

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MLAS 260 75

Ethics and Literature

Professor Michael Hodges
Location: 109 Furman Hall
Days and Time: Wednesday evenings 6:30 – 9:00
First Class: September 3

Course Overview:
This course is the fifth course in the MLAS Certificate in Ethics series. Enrollment priority will be given to those continuing students in the ethics certificate program, with others allowed into the course contingent upon available space.

Ethics as typically studied is either a theoretical investigation into the basis of values and principles or an examination of particular moral problems that arise in a given area such as medical ethics or business ethics. What is sometimes overlooked is that ethical questions arise in the real world amid complex narratives – stories where the characters have histories and futures. Human beings are not abstract moral agents. They are parents, business people, children or grown-ups etc. We cannot share directly in any such narratives ourselves, but literature lets us peek into many narratives and to see the living breathing substance of moral concerns. We may find individuals who make choices that none of us would make, still in context we can appreciate them. They may live in times that are not our own, and they may face situations that we might wish never to confront; however, but literature lets us, for a time, travel their paths. In this course, presupposing some familiarity with ethical theory, we will read and carefully examine a number of works in which real moral concerns are at the center of the narratives. We will try to isolate the issues and to bring philosophical considerations to bear.

Readings for course:

Mark Twain Huckleberry Finn Voltaire Candide
F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby Sophocles Antigone
Peter Taylor A Woman of Means M.L. King “Letter from
the Birmingham Jail” (handout)
Camus The Plague David Guterson Snow Falling on Cedars
Michael Frayn Copenhagen Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart
Edwin A. Abbott Flatland E. M. Forester A Passage to India
Kate Chopin The Awakening  

Course Instructor:
Professor Michael P. Hodges is chair of the Department of Philosophy at Vanderbilt, where he has been a faculty member since 1970.  He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the College of William & Mary, and his Ph.D. degree from the University of Virginia.  He regularly teaches courses in American Philosophy, Wittgenstein, and Philosophy of Religion.  Among his many publications are “Faith: Themes from Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche,” “Religion without Transcendence,” “The Status of Ethical Judgment in Philosophical Investigations,” and “The Ontological Project Considered: The Displacement of Theoretical by Practical Unity.” He has recently co-authored Thinking in the Ruins: Wittgenstein and Santayana on Contingency with Professor John Lachs, also on faculty at Vanderbilt. His current research includes a book on philosophy of education and a series of papers on transcendence.

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MLAS 270 31

Medical Anthropology

Professor Beth Conklin
Location: 201 Buttrick Hall
Days and Time: Thursday evenings 6:30 – 9:00
First class: September 17th

Course Overview:
Medical anthropology is a holistic discipline that incorporates perspectives from both anthropology and the health sciences to understand how health and disease are related to culture, behavior, social relations, and environment. Illness is an inevitable part of being human life, and studying how people respond and adapt to affliction can reveal much about social life.

This course explores how culture influences the ways that patients and physicians and other healers think about and experience health, disease, healing, and the medicalization of social problems. Part of our inquiry will examine our own Euro-American biomedical system, looking at how many so-called “biological facts,” therapeutic practices, and experiences of illness and disability are shaped by western cultural values and social patterns. We will contrast these familiar patterns in North America and Europe with medical beliefs and practices in several non-Western societies, exploring case studies from Asian, Latin American, and African communities in which healing is based in different understandings of the nature of the human body, mind, and spirit. A parallel concern is to understand how political-economic forces, including poverty, inequity, and economic priorities, influence health patterns and medical care.

With this grounding in an understanding of cultural and political economic influences on health and disease, a major aim will be to consider how anthropological insights into the social and cultural dimensions of illness and healing can be applied to practical problems to improve health conditions and patient care in the United States and other diverse, multicultural societies. Throughout this course, we will seek to identify priorities and workable strategies that may help caregivers, medical professionals, citizens, and policy-makers create higher quality, culturally appropriate health care for all.

Textbooks:

  • The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition, by Arthur Kleinman
  • Illness and Culture in Contemporary Japan, by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney
  • Medicine and Culture, by Lynn Payer
  • The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1997), by Anne Fadiman
  • The Body Silent, by Robert Murphy

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