Page 107 of Scripps College Academic Catalog 2004-2006 by Scripps College - The Women's College - Claremont

105 THE HUMANITIES SCRIPPS COLLEGE Greeks and others /Greeks and us.This course asks two interrelated questions: how did the Greeks represent cultures, which they called barbaroi (non-Greek), and how do we construct the Greeks in relation to our own changing definitions of ourselves? We will examine Greek representations of the other in literature, history, myth, and the visual arts, as well as our representations of Greeks in scholarship, in the media, and especially on the stage. Readings include Herodotus,Aeschylus, and Bernals Black Athena.The final project, in addition to written work, will be a student-generated production of a Greek play about non-Greeks. E. Finkelpearl. The Making of History:Work and Race in Greater Los Angeles. This course is a practicum in critical thinking about larger social issues. It requires students to take independent initiative in carrying out research projects that analyze the histories of women, people of color, and working people in Greater Los Angeles. Each student chooses a topic and mines a vein of oral history and archival sources.The topics are paired to an internship in the community with handson organizing experience.As a class, we will sharpen various analytical tools drawn from ethnic and womens studies, history, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, and political economy.The final project will be a paper that weaves together the archival and oral history. C. Forster. The Second Wave: Post-War to Post-Feminism. The course looks at the changing roles of women in America since World War II, to make a point about the social construction of femininity. It combines literature, film, history, sociology, and psychology to investigate the relationship between womans position in society and her representation in fiction, film, and fashion, and explore how cultural and aesthetic constructions of femininity vary with progress and reaction or backlash as it is named by Faludi.The larger aim of the course is to teach students to be readers of their culture, to teach them to read the codes of the culture via fiction, film, media, and fashion images. Final projects require independent research on women in relation to one of the shaping influences of the culture advertising, media, art, politics, music, television, film, fashion, etc. and an autobiographical account, growing out of the readings of the course, of the students own relation to the culture. Offered in 2004-2005.G. Greene. Enlightenment England:The Nature of Nature. This course will explore changing attitudes toward nature developed during the 18th century in England and its empire, by surveying representations of nature in novels, poetry, essays, music, and the visual arts (paintings, sculpture, gardens, furniture, and architecture). Concepts of reason, liberty, and social constraints will be examined. B. Coats. Sites of Seduction: Aesthetic Contexts of the French Garden. Framed within the multiple contexts of art, architecture, literature, politics, and social history, this course will decode the French garden as a site of interdisciplinary inquiry. Our study will focus on the shift from order to chaos that occurred as Louis XIVs 17th-century brand of absolutism gave way to 18th-century notions of exoticism, intimacy, and individualism, which affected not only landscape design but also the entire aesthetic fabric of pre-revolutionary France.To what degree is aesthetic experience universally valid? To what extent is it culturally determined? These are the sorts of questions that are central to our inquiry.This course includes a research component that involves a final project. Students select a site of seduction outside of France, decode its meaning, and propose how its essential configurations are linked to our course inquiry. Offered in 2004-2005.E. Haskell. Reel World. What is the difference between fiction films and nonfiction films? Do documentaries simply observe the real world? If not, how do they represent reality and to what purposes? What choices do documentarists make when they approach a topic? What narrative and stylistic strategies do they use and to what effects? What social, cultural, and political functions have films (from ethnographic films, cinema v rit to memory films, as well as propaganda, educational, or social activist documentaries), this course will introduce students to the history and the theory of documentary film practice. Note that this course is not a course of methods of documentary film production.The work done by students will involve analyses of different documentaries as opposed to actual film production. N. Rachlin. Women and Development in Asia. This comparative course will investigate the ways in which gendered policies and constructions of gender have structured development in Asia over the last 50 years, with an emphasis on the experiences of women.We will discuss development in terms of its philosophical and ideological underpinnings and its link to the discourses of modernity. Issues will include narratives of development, feminization of labor and migration, sex tourism, and popular movements to redefine development. A. Suh.

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