Naughty Fictional Translators

Offered as WLT 178 & SPN 178. This course focuses on fictional portraits of iconoclastic translators and/or interpreters. The first two months are devoted to a (relatively) “slow reading” of Don Quixote as a pioneer text in terms of attributing a central role to a fictional translator. The third month is devoted to international films and short stories--largely, but not exclusively, from the Spanish-speaking world, which has experienced a remarkable upsurge of “transfictions” (i.e., fictions about translators) since the ‘90s. Taught in English.

Colq: T-Dwelling Poetically

To introduce the pleasures of poetry, this course travels through poems on themes of journeying and dwelling, voyage and return, travel and home, wandering, war and immigration. Reading ancient Chinese songs and Greek epic to contemporary docupoetry and rap, we explore key elements of poetic art

T-Dreams, Magic, Sublime

Modernity is traditionally characterized as the Age of Reason and the beginning of a radical critique of religious superstition and political obscurantism. This vision of culture tends to repress the fascination with madness, dreams, the irrational, and the sublime that permeated the most advanced literatures and theories. Starting in the late eighteenth century, avant-garde artists begin to explore the claim that logic and rationality cannot account for all of human experience.

T-Cannibals, Witches, Virgins

An examination of the rewritings and adaptations of the three iconic figures of Shakespeare’s The Tempest—Caliban the demi-devil savage other, Sycorax the devil-whore, and Miranda the virgin-goddess—by writers from different geographies, time periods and ideological persuasions. Using texts such as Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest, Rachel Ingalls’ Mrs.

Master/Move:Theatre&Landscape

We explore the dramatic potential of natural landscapes and built environments as they stir us to
creative collaborations in performance, and to deeper considerations and responses to a world out of
balance. We create original, devised performances, using source texts drawn from theatre, poetry,
painting, sculpture and music, to explore performance in relationship to the landscape. Through short
presentations across the Smith campus and beyond (including the MacLeish Field Station), we seek to

Writing for Theatre I

The means and methods of the playwright and the writer for television and the cinema. Analysis of the structure and dialogue of a few selected plays. Weekly and biweekly exercises in writing for various media. Goal for beginning playwrights: to draft a one-act play by the end of the semester. Plays by students are considered for staging. L and P with writing sample required, best submitted weeks prior to registration.
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