Kafka arouses pity and terror, Joyce admiration, Proust and Gide respect, but no modern writer that I can think of, except Camus, has aroused love. His death in 1960 was felt a personal loss by the whole literate world." (Susan Sontag) This course will address the full range of his published writings - fiction, philosophy, and drama. The focus will be on the thought and art of Camus, with particular attention to the Hellenic foundations of Camus' vision, inattention to which has contributed to the most blatant and common misreadings of his work.

The modern lyric has often been identified with extreme forms of language. But what does it mean for language to be extreme, to be the outlier or the limit case? Extreme with respect to what? In this course we will examine ideas about "extremity" and language through the corpuses of five major poets who wrote or who are writing in French: Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, Aime Cesaire, Michel Deguy, and Edouard Glissant. How does the question of lyric extremity frame or bring out the tensions between autobiography, intimacy, and singularity and universalist claims?

This course is for students with the solid knowledge of Western music fundamentals including the proficiency with staff notation, intervals and chords identification as well as basic melodic and rhythmic sight-reading skills. After a quick review, we first explore functions of melodic and harmonic intervals in species counterpoint. The class then proceeds to the study of four-part diatonic harmony and voice-leading techniques. In this section, we also begin to learn relationships between cadences and forms and compose a four-voice chorale using a binary form for a midterm project.

This course will examine a number of texts (novels, essays, short stories, poems, film, comics) which shaped-and contested-the notion of the United States as an empire from the mid-1850s until the early 2000s, while also complicating the notion of a nationally bound American literary canon.

In this labor-intensive class, we'll explore the potential of illustration as visual narrative based on assignments and prompts, using a range of materials and artistic approaches. Students will create illustrations to accompany fiction and non-fiction from fairy tales to op-ed articles, from song lyrics to journal entries; purely visual pieces and works that integrate both words and images. We'll examine narrative illustrations from a range of periods and cultures.

Best known for her experiments with form and style in the modernist novel, Virginia Woolf was also deeply engaged with the literary and artistic currents of her time. This course addresses the lesser-known women writers and artists who worked alongside Woolf, both in the Bloomsbury Group and in overlapping activist circles.

This course will focus on installation and public practice in conversation with diverse media: video, digital, audio, photo, film, performance, architecture, and the plastic arts. The thematic focus of the seminar will critically engage issues of technology, vision, and site. Also of importance is the nature of video as electronic technology and the relationship of immediacy that it has with installation. This is a rigorous theory/practice workshop class designed specifically for Division II and III students.

This course will explore the photographic techniques of cyanotype, platinum/palladium and carbon printing processes. Students will be introduced to historic and contemporary photographers using these and other alternative print processes. Workshops, readings, and critique will dovetail the more technical aspects of this class. Although there will be a good deal of technical application covered in this course, the overall objective is to explore these print processes that will offer creative options for students wishing to further expand their personal vision.

This course is designed for students interested in merging social activism, performing and literary arts and teaching. It teaches students to use movement arts and literary arts in settings such as senior centers, residential treatment centers for incarcerated youth, and youth recreation centers. In studio sessions, students will learn how to construct classes and dance and movement exchanges or events for community sites.

This seminar is based on a close, comparative reading of the critical theorist Walter Benjamin, the artist Paul Klee and the filmmaker Wim Wenders. Linking history, tragedy, desire and hope to the figures of the angel, the ghost, the puppet, the trapeze artist, and the automaton, these three authors open up an examination of materiality, abstraction, representation, the seen and the unseen, the purposeful, the ephemeral, the accidental, the heartbreaking and the playful.