Topics course. Prerequisite: FMS 280. Enrollment limited to 12. https://www.smith.edu/academics/film-media-studies/apply-fms-282: Through conventional filmmaking aesthetics and techniques, this advanced course includes hands-on trainings and workshops geared toward creating a feature-length project. Developing a long-form narrative, experimental, documentary, or episodic project, students write thirty pages of a full-length screenplay, while also producing, directing, and editing a ten-minute sample clip.

Required for all seniors pursuing the museums concentration, this seminar provides a forum for students to develop research capstone projects that synthesize their previous coursework and practical experiences for the Museums Concentration. These projects are supplemented by weekly seminar meetings in which students explore and critique the mission and work of museums and contemporary forces shaping them. Class sections also provide a forum for progress reports and discussion of individual research projects as well as final presentations.

Same as RES 264. Focuses on close reading of the major novels, short fiction, and journalism of Dostoevsky, one of the greatest writers in modern literature. Combining penetrating psychological insight with the excitement of crime fiction, Dostoevsky’s works explore profound political, philosophical, and religious issues, in a Russia populated by students and civil servants, saints and revolutionaries, writers and madmen.

Topics course. May be repeated once with a different topic: Starting in the late eighteenth century, avant-garde artists began to explore the claim that logic and rationality cannot account for all of human experience; they were fascinated by madness, dreams, the irrational, and the sublime. We will be investigating this phenomenon from a literary, artistic, and philosophical point of view, from the time of the Enlightenment philosophers to the twentieth century.

Topics course: The Anthropocene has already disrupted many assumptions founded on the relative climatic stability of the Holocene bringing our attention to the interdependency and interconnectedness of geological and human agents. How can we tell the story of what Amitav Ghosh calls "The Great Derangement"? What are the languages and images which enable us to translate between the complex stratifications of nature and culture? What stories do earth, matter, plants, objects tell us about inter-species communication?

Same as WLT 330. The capstone seminar brings together a cohort of concentrators to discuss a final translation project that each student undertakes with the guidance of their adviser in the concentration and to situate the project within the framework of larger questions that the work of translation elicits.

Same as TSX 330. The capstone seminar brings together a cohort of concentrators to discuss a final translation project that each student undertakes with the guidance of their adviser in the concentration and to situate the project within the framework of larger questions that the work of translation elicits.

An examination of race, identity, and resistance in African, Caribbean, and African American literatures through the lens of coming-of-age novels. This course will enable students to critically engage the political and aesthetic imperatives of black writing by interrogating the thematics and legacies of slavery, colonialism, and racism. How do writers of Africa and the African diaspora appropriate the Bildungsroman as a literary form in their constructions of identity, freedom, and citizenship? What makes this genre particularly useful for the liberatory project of black imagination?

What is a Holocaust story? How does literature written in extremis in ghettos, death camps, or in hiding differ from the vast post-war literature about the Holocaust? How to balance competing claims of individual and collective experience, the rights of the imagination and the pressures for historical accuracy? Selections from a variety of genres (diary, reportage, poetry, novel, graphic novel, memoir, film, monuments, museums), and critical theories of representation. All readings in translation. No prerequisites.

From the earliest Chinese poetry to the latest Arabic Internet novels, comparative literature makes available new worlds—and “newly visible” old worlds. To become “world-forming,” one must realize one’ belonging to a given world or worlds, as well as one’s finitude. To rethink the relationship between literature and world, each section of this course focuses on a given genre, movement or theme. Through topics such as “Epic Worlds,” ”The Short Story” and “Literature and Medicine,” we consider the creation of worlds through words. May be repeated once with a different topic.