Fall 2007 WGS Course Offerings

WGS 101: Window on Women’s and Gender Studies (1 hr):
Wanda Balzano/Mary Gerardy
Meets Tuesday: September 4 & December 4 at 11:00 am
Tribble A4
An opportunity to experience and reflect analytically on the diverse cultural and intellectual life of Wake Forest, with an emphasis on Women’s and Gender Studies events and topics.  Students will attend events and write about them. Class meets twice.  P/F only. Please see WGS 101 for more information.

WGS 221A: Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies (3 hr):
Ulrike Wiethaus/ Gary Ljungquist
Wednesday 3:00-5:30 pm
Greene 310
An interdisciplinary course that integrates materials from the humanities and the sciences, taught by women’s and gender studies faculty representing at least two fields.  Topics include critical methods and practical solutions, history and theory of women’s and gender studies, women in culture and society, and cross-cultural issues of gender, ethnicity, social class, disability, and sexual orientation.  (CD) More Information  

Other Courses

Although First-Year Seminars (FYS 100) and the Writing Seminars (ENG 111) count as basic requirements rather than minor or major requirements, these courses may be of interest to students who are curious about Women's and Gender Studies.

ENG 111E: Crime, Justice, (In)equality
Elizabeth Anker
MWF 11:00-11:50am

What makes a “just” society? How do we evaluate the growing gap between rich and poor in the United States, and between wealthy “Western” and indigent “Third World” nations internationally? Are there processes of redistribution or economic and political structures that might make for a more equitable world order? How should the legal system remedy wrongdoing; what types of punishment are merited and just? In this writing seminar, we will pose questions such as these to understand what we mean by the complex concepts of “justice,” “equality,” and “punishment.” We will begin by exploring class, race, and gender in the United States as they impact issues ranging from unemployment and the minimum wage to criminal sentencing and the death penalty. We will then shift to challenges for social justice on an international scale by interrogating timely and urgent debates about transnational movement and immigration. Finally, in light of the constant threat of global epidemics and disease, we will consider the bounds of corporate responsibility for the health and wellbeing of the dispossessed in the non-Western world. Our texts will consist of a combination of short articles and selections (from Aristotle to The New York Times) as well as the following books: Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, Albert Camus’ The Stranger, and J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K. We will also be studying three films: Dead Man Walking, Dirty Pretty Things, and The Constant Gardener.

In addition to a sustained investigation of our seminar topic, we will spend significant course time developing our skills in academic writing. We will learn about the parts of argument, how to organize a coherent paper, the structure of a persuasive and engaging introduction, and how to conduct both library and electronic research. In the process of writing each of the four required papers, we will workshop outlines as well as paper drafts.

ENG 111 Q & W: Where Are You From?: Childhood, Place, and Identity Formation
David Davis
ENG 111Q: TR 12:00-1:15pm
ENG 111W: TR 1:30-2:45pm

How does the place you are from affect the person you have become? This course examines the process of identity formation that takes place as a person transitions from child to young adult, focusing on the hometown. We will use a selection of novels and autobiographies about place and coming of age as a means of exploring this process.
Does a person develop differently in a city than in a small town? Does immigration impede or advance development? How does place impact other identity markers, such as race, class, gender, and religion? Is a connection to place necessary? Is it less important now than it was for your parents or your grandparents? What is your story? Our discussions will lead to exercises in expository, argumentative, and research writing.

Texts: Annie Dillard, An American Childhood; Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi; Lan Cao, MonkeyBridge; and James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain.

ENG 111N: P assers and Posers: Questions of Identity in 20th-Century Literature
Elizabeth Evans
TR 9:30-10:45am

In this course we will investigate issues of identity through twentieth-century literature. “Identity” of course has many components. We are born into socially-constructed identities by virtue of our gender, class, race, nationality, and so on. The way we think of our own identity, and what others think of us, are further influenced by aspects including: work, pastimes, education, sexuality, religion, and perceptions of relative physical and mental “health.” Writers are often concerned with constructs of identity, and the manner in which we manipulate and transform those constructs when we seek to go beyond their boundaries. Many authors show us how individual identity has political implications, as with the concept of “passing” (posing and/or being mistaken as a member of a group from which one is excluded) and the generation of “hybrid,” or blended, identities. In this course students will investigate how a range of twentieth-century writers have probed the parameters of identity in their novels, short fiction, plays, and films, and enter the conversation with their own writing.

The emphasis of this course will be on critical reading and writing, in particular, learning to compose a written argument. This includes learning the principles of writing and revising essays; adapting writing for a particular audience; finding, summarizing, analyzing and synthesizing information from single and multiple texts; and organizing information into a persuasive and coherent essay.

Course texts will most likely include George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Nella Larsen’s Passing, Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Louise Erdrich’s Tracks, David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, and Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street. Required film screenings will probably include Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game, and David Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly.

ENG 111 B & F: Globalization and Culture
Omaar Hena
ENG 111B: MWF 10:00-10:50am
ENG 111F: MWF 11:00-11:50am

Globalization may be the defining feature of the contemporary world and yet no one seems to agree exactly what it means. For some, globalization brings the dream of cross-cultural connection and the founding of global civil society; but for others it spells the on-going nightmare of Western cultural imperialism and inter-ethnic conflict. Throughout the term, this course will question how globalization and culture interact with one another.

Does culture simply reflect globalization, at least as critics and scholars debate the term? Or does culture imagine and produce forms of globalization that are not accounted for in theory? And how might an emphasis on culture and cultural difference (race, class, gender, and sexuality) in a global context change the way we think about, relate to, and live in our global era?

In order to approach these questions, this seminar will do two things at once. From one end, we will investigate how globalization is debated in scholarly texts from across the humanities including economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and cultural studies. These short readings will provide a critical vocabulary for talking about the discourse of globalization. In addition, they will show how the very meaning of globalization multiplies and shifts depending on who is speaking, where they are speaking from, the terms they use, and the way they frame the problem of globalization. Possible critical authors will likely include Samuel Huntington, Benjamin Barber, Thomas Friedman, Samir Amin, Edward Said, Joseph Stiglitz, Arjun Appadurai, Mike Featherstone, Stuart Hall, Robin Cohen, Emmanual Todd, and Kwame Anthony Appiah.

From the other end, we will also interpret how various cultural practices, drawn from high and low, East and West, mirror and re-configure critical understandings of globalization. We’ll read Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land, films such as Dirty Pretty Things and La Promesse, women’s and men’s magazines, global advertising (Nike, Coke, Benetton), world music and popular television. We will also visit local ethnic restaurants and art galleries in Winston. Through these encounters, students will ask how the creation, circulation, and consumption of culture, as well as the larger contexts informing any encounter with culture, represents and re-imagines globalization. All the while, I’ll want us to question how we ourselves participate in the production of knowledge about global culture. Put another way, if we are writing on globalization and culture, how do these two entities write on us?

From both of these angles, I hope students will participate in a lively, on-going debate over the dialectical relation between globalization and culture: how they overlap, diverge, and contest one another. The requirements comprise two in-class presentations, regular mini-responses, three papers (4-5 pages), and a final paper (5-7 pages) that puts it all together due during exam week. Given the global content of this class, I especially welcome students of color, international students, and students who have traveled abroad.