This purpose of this course is to explore the relationship between literature and its cultural and historical contexts with the methodological premise that literature both reflects and helps to shape the culture in which it is written. Focused on the relationship between literature and history after the eighteenth century, this course will explore the formulation and development of the post-Enlightenment subject. How we might ask, did the notion of this kind of “individual” as a social, political, cultural, and economic subject get articulated and evolve over time? After the political and philosophical upheavals of the post-Enlightenment era, England and America began to define simultaneously connected and different identities while also engaging in a more self-conscious literary and philosophical dialogue. Versions of this course may subsequently explore Romantic engagement with the emergence of these identities in an increasingly secular, industrial, and multicultural world with such authors as William Blake, William Godwin, William Wordsworth, Maria Edgeworth, Mary and Percy Shelley, Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Christina Rossetti in Britain and Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Emily Dickinson in America. These courses may also explore how artists made a radical break with nineteenth-century traditions by investigating the innovative strategies of artists like T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner, who represented modern consciousness and subjectivity through stylistic dislocation and fragmentation. Other topics in this class may examine later twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century writers such as Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison, Derek Walcott, and Zadie Smith, who complicated these modernist innovations by exploring the human condition in an age characterized by the rise of mass and visual culture, the threat of atomic destruction, the disintegration of colonial empires, increasingly pressing issues of ethnic and national identity, and the rise of terrorism and global conflict. Not open to students who have received credit for ENGL 282 or ENGL 283 unless permission granted by the department chair. This course satisfies the Core Curriculum requirement in the Arts. Prerequisite or co-requisites: English 102, CORE 101, or CORE 301.
Literature in History I: Before 1800
The purpose of this course is to explore the relationship between literature and its cultural and historical contexts with the methodological premise that literature both reflects and helps to shape the culture in which it is written. How do literary texts grapple with and even intervene in central political, religious, and cultural questions and debates? How are prevailing cultural values and beliefs embedded in and challenged by literature? While attending to questions of genre, authorship, and historical and cultural context, the course may consist of selected readings of early Western literature chosen from its beginnings in the Homeric epics, Greek tragedies, and the Hebrew Testament; through major works of Christian culture in the Middle Ages, such as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Dante’s Divine Comedy; to the revival of classical learning in the Renaissance, embodied in the work of such authors as William Shakespeare and John Milton; through authors of the Enlightenment including Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and Benjamin Franklin. The course may examine classical and Biblical works in translation, as well as works originally written in English. Always, however, this course will explore something of what early literature in the West tells us about changing notions of the spiritual and the material, of the relationship between self and society, of heroism, faith, love and redemption—and the relationship of these ideals to our world today. Different topics include “Troy through Time”; “Britain’s Greatest Hits, from Beowulf to Gulliver’s Travels”; “Epic Journeys: Middle Ages to the Renaissance”; and “Authors and Authority from the Middle Ages through the Protestant Reformation.” Formerly ENGL 281; not open to students who have received credit for ENGL 281 unless permission granted by the department chair. This course satisfies the Core Curriculum requirement in the Arts. Prerequisites or co-requisites: English 102, CORE 101, or CORE 301.
Classroom Assistantship in Philosophy
Supervised experience in the understanding and explanation of philosophical concepts and reasoning. Meeting regularly with the instructor, classroom assistants help an instructor in duties that may include convening meetings with students outside of regular class time, reading drafts of students’ papers, correcting (but not grading) short homework assignments and drafting examination questions. This course will follow the general college guidelines. Students eligible for classroom assistantships must have a minimum GPA of 2.5, be of junior or senior standing or must have completed two courses of 200-level or above work in philosophy. May be repeated for a total of eight credits but a maximum of four credit hours of such work may be applied toward fulfillment of the student’s major requirements.
Counseling Theories and Methods
An introduction to the major theoretical models of counseling, their methodological foundations, and their current applications and modalities. The course also provides students with an understanding of ethical and professional issues in the field. Prerequisite: PSYC 101. This course serves as the prerequisite for PSYC 370 (Counseling and Psychotherapy with Laboratory).
Welfare Politics
This course exposes students to the comparative study of welfare politics. It explores the various types of welfare benefits that exist and which types different states choose to primarily provide for their citizens. The course covers factors that explain the emergence of different welfare states, as well as the implications of public welfare for poverty, inequality, and immigration and for specific demographics such as youth, the elderly and women. It explores the politics of welfare in the United States, Western Europe, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and Africa.
Model United Nations
Enrollment open only to members of the St. Mary’s College of MD Model United Nations Club who plan to attend conference.
Maryland Student Legislature
Students must join in the Maryland Student Legislature program. Additionally, students must attend the Spring Interim Assembly as well as the Annual Session of the Maryland Student Legislature. Sponsor at least two pieces of legislation, one at the Maryland Student Legislature Spring Interim Assembly and one at the Maryland Student Legislature Annual Session.
Feminist Political Thought
This course introduces students to contemporary feminist political theory, and its preceding history. By directing attention to the role of women and gender in some central areas of political theory, feminist political theorists have challenged, modified, and expanded our understandings of fundamental political concepts.
African Politics
This course introduces students to the contemporary political challenges and opportunities facing Africa. It briefly covers European colonialism and decolonization to provide historical context. The majority of the course centers on contemporary issues such as political violence, poverty, clientelism, corruption, elections and ethnicity. The course also focuses on a number of special topics, including the politics of food, oil, and disease.
Contemporary Political Thought
This course will introduce students to many of the approaches and ideas in the contemporary era of political philosophy. We will seek to assess how, and why, these thinkers’ notions of key concepts in political theory such as power, morality, justice, liberty, equality, democracy, revolution, inclusion, diversity, and others, have influenced, or not influenced, our current political language and culture? How does contemporary political theory as a whole reflect, and/or differ from, both modern and ancient political theories and approaches?
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