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WCore Fine Arts and Humanities Courses

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WCore Requirements

ART 106 Drawing, Inquiry, and Expression 4 Credits
This course introduces students to the art of drawing and visual communication. It covers fundamental techniques, materials, vocabulary, and modes of communication inherent to the medium. Students will also learn basic terms and techniques pertaining to creation and critique of drawings, and the presentation and storage of finished artworks. This course will also challenge students to hone their visual literacy, encouraging them to analyze and understand works of art through both historical and contemporary lenses. (WCore: WCFAH)
       
ART 111 Paint, Perception, and Alchemy 4 Credits
This course introduces students to the art of painting and visual communication. It covers fundamental techniques, materials, vocabulary, and modes of communication inherent to the medium. Students will also learn basic terms and techniques pertaining to creation and critique of painting, and the presentation and storage of finished artworks. This course will also challenge students to hone their visual literacy, encouraging them to analyze and understand works of art through both historical and contemporary lenses. (WCore: WCFAH)
       
ART 128 Maker's Lab 4 Credits
We live in a designed world. Our lived experience is the result of decisions made in the creative process and says as much about aesthetics as it does about effective design. This class engages students in discussions, written responses, hands-on studio workshops, and innovative problem-solving as a way to consider the aesthetics and design in our world. Using fundamental concepts from drawing and painting, sculpture and 3D construction, digital tools, and design, we will apply design-based thinking to solve problems, revise and evaluate existing solutions, and personally redefine the creative process. Work across several disciplines will allow us to see the interconnection and relationships between traditionally disparate fields of study. Simultaneously, this course will provide students the opportunity to expand and integrate their creative skills, gain experience with specialized technology, and develop a portfolio of interdisciplinary objects and ideas that demonstrate creative flexibility and a multifaceted understanding of complex issues. Alongside individual projects, we will identify and analyze real world problems, as a way to connect what we do in the classroom to our community. (WCore: WCFAH)
       
ART 148 Ceramics I: Material Studies 4 Credits
This course introduces students to the fundamental nature, practices, techniques, and culture of working in clay. Students will receive an introduction into the four basic building techniques of ceramics. It is a course that will familiarize the student with a utilitarian and artistic material that has been used for millennia and continues to be found useful in new technological and industrial manners. Students will be given an understanding of the practice of time management, a key component to the success of working in clay and a necessity in daily life. Students will learn ceramic hand-building, pottery, glazing, and firing methods as a means of self-expression and communication. (WCore: WCFAH and RE)
       
ART 180 Photography 4 Credits
With the introduction of contemporary technology, vision itself has become our most immediate form of communication and expression. Although we will look at and discuss the work of others, this course is primarily about each student making her/his own personal images. In this course, students will learn basic technical skills for the beginning photographer. These include camera operation, developing and scanning black and white film, basic grayscale digital image processing, making prints from negatives, making inkjet prints and presentation. Students will also learn the grammar of this language; use of the frame, time, vantage, and detail. Students will investigate the relationship of form to content. Most importantly, students will use these skills to explore their own vision and ideas. Through discussions and group critiques, they will share this work with each other and receive feedback to help them refine it. They will produce affective images that examine their personal perception and concepts. (WCore: WCFAH)
       
ART 210 Traditional Photography 4 Credits
More photographs are uploaded to Facebook every two minutes than were made during the first 60 years of the history of photography. With the shift to digital technology and the convenience it affords, electronic photography has replaced traditional, silver-based photography as our mainstream method of visual expression and communication. Traditional photography, however, continues to be practiced with a strong and passionate following. Most serious photographers consider it necessary to learn these skills to truly understand the medium, and many practice it for its immediacy and hands-on intimacy. This course will introduce skills, techniques, and materials of traditional, silver-based black and white photography. These skills include use of camera types, including view cameras and hand-held cameras, lenses, light metering techniques, lighting techniques, and refined development and traditional printing techniques. We will examine how different technologies have introduced different methods, and how these methods have shaped, and been shaped by, cultural aesthetics and priorities. We will discuss and examine artistic and photographic concerns, and deal with the advancement of personal visual and conceptual skills needed to produce affective images. Students in this course will experiment with a variety of materials, techniques, and philosophical approaches to traditional photography, and ultimately produce a body of work that exhibits their own personal investigations and creative expression. (WCore: WCFAH)
       
ART 215 Drawing Lines in the Sand 4 Credits
This hybrid studio-seminar course examines art about landscape, space, and environments, while challenging students to build on these ideas in their own creative work. Students will research artworks and writings that explore topics such as landscape, “wild” and urban space, public and private spaces, land(scapes) and power, using this context to inform their creative works that address these same topics. This course simultaneously introduces students to fundamental drawing techniques, with a special focus on drawings and images made using landscape, nature, and hybridized modes of visual communication. No previous experience with drawing is required. (WCore: WCFAH, RE)
       
DANCE 110 Creative Process 3 Credits
This course is an interdisciplinary and playful exploration of the creative process in dance for anyone - no previous dance experience  required. Students participate in theoretical and practical content to develop an understanding of our moving bodies, movement  potential, personal voice, and collaboration via tools of improvisation, composition, and communication through movement. (WCore:  WCFAH and DE)
       
FILM 110 Making Sense of Movies 4 Credits
This course examines the formal elements of film and its history, from the earliest experiments in motion photography through the present. Students will learn the terminology and concepts of film analysis (mise-en-scene, montage, cinematography, etc.) in the context of film’s evolution across the twentieth century. Films may include profanity, violence, and/or sexually explicit images. (WCore: WCFAH, RE)
       
FILM 210 (Un)American Cinema 4 Credits
This course seeks to understand American film history in light of one decisive set of events: the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings on communism in the film industry and the resulting industry blacklist. These events extended from 1947 until the late 1950s, which is obviously a small portion of American cinema history. We will situate them in relation to a broader historical context. For instance, the blacklist is incomprehensible without some sense of how the Hollywood studio system operated and the threat it was under in the late forties. And if the economic conditions in Hollywood played a decisive role in the blacklist, they continue to determine the political and aesthetic character of American movies to this day. We will treat the blacklist as a particularly vivid convergence of the factors that have shaped American cinema from the beginning, including the circumstances of international capitalism (and communism), the political beliefs and artistic aspirations of particular filmmakers, and the struggle between nativism and cosmopolitanism in American culture as a whole and in American cinema in particular. (WCore: WCFAH, RE)
       
FILM 212 Film Genres 4 Credits
This course explores the history, procedures, and consequences of organizing popular films into distinct “genres” (i.e., Western, Sci-Fi, Fantasy). The course will consider such questions as how genres get established, how we know that a film falls into a particular genre, how genres organize audience expectations, and how films may either meet or upset those expectations. (WCore: WCFAH)
       
FILM 220 Transnational Cinema 4 Credits
Because it is generally directed at a mass audience and because it has played a founding role in modern societies’ ways of representing themselves and educating (or indoctrinating) their citizens, cinema is even more visibly and emphatically political than other art forms. In this course, we will study three “cases” in the history of world cinema in an effort to get some understanding of how films operate on and in history. We will conceive “history” not as a progression of events through time but rather as a series of struggles among individuals and groups within particular societies. Because resistance to oppression is an explicit goal of the films we will study, we will focus on how cinema addresses sites of solidarity and oppression like ethnicities, tribal structures, religion communities, and genders and modes of sexual expression and practice.(WCore: WCFAH, DE)
       
GNDR 101 Gender, Sex, and Identity 4 Credits
The central aim of this course is to foster critical thinking about gender and how the concept of gender structures relationships of power around us every day. This means that we will think about, write about, and talk about questions related to what gender is, how it affects us, and how it can change. Throughout this course, we will draw on several different disciplines, such as sociology, philosophy, literature, and political science, to develop a multi-faceted understanding of how gender structures our lives. We will also look at specific topics related to the intersections of race and gender, sexual identity, gender inequality, and the flexibility of gender categories.(WCore: WCFAH, DE)
       
HIST 102 Alien Encounters in History 4 Credits
People often make the judgment that since the past has influenced our own world, the people of the past must somehow be “like us” in fundamental ways. This course will seek to undermine that judgment by arguing that we are fundamentally different from people in the past and that in understanding these differences, we can more freely choose our futures. Our field of inquiry will be European History in the centuries that include the Ancient World through the Renaissance. In particular, we will examine the ways in which Europeans (a definition that evolves over time) define themselves through encountering and interacting with “alien” cultures. Examples: What’s the difference between civilized people and barbarians? How do the people on both sides of the Crusades misunderstand each other? How do the Khan and the Pope try to negotiate their communication? These are a few of the “alien” encounters that we will study. (WCore: WCFAH and WE)
       
HIST 111 Patterns of Global Immigration 4 Credits
This course looks at the recent history of global immigration patterns in the context of modern world history, paying particular attention to the last century, or so, of migration. The course focuses on immigrant experiences in the US and Europe but it also closely examines global circumstances that affect who becomes an immigrant and why. Students will explore immigration through a variety of writing assignments that focus on the historical and contemporary influences shaping the immigration experience in many parts of the world. (WCore:, WCFAH, WE)
       
HIST 120 The Story of America 4 Credits
This class will serve as an introduction to American history from the colonial period to the present day. We will seek to answer some fundamental questions: How did we get here? How did we go from a handful of small, not very important British colonies to the richest and most powerful nation on earth? How free have Americans been, who has wielded power, and how has that changed over time? How do historians construct their versions of the past? (WCore: WCFAH, DE)
       
HIST 123 Citizenship and Voting in Europe 4 Credits
This course examines the struggle for citizenship and its attendant benefits in European History. The course will follow this focus by selectively looking at European history from the Renaissance through WWII. Approximately two weeks of the course will be developed to a service learning project related to individuals seeking citizenship and/or voter registration here in Salt Lake City. We will look at how the current local issues relating to obtaining citizen rights affect our understanding of the issues that have aided and impeded citizenship in history. (WCore: WCFAH, WE)
       
HIST 202 America’s Best Idea 4 Credits
In 1872 the U.S. Congress declared the Yellowstone region the world’s first “national park.” In 1916 Congress created the National Park Service, “which purpose is to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” Today the Park Service manages 407 “units” with 28 different designations – including national parks, monuments, historical parks, military parks, preserves, recreation areas, seashores, parkways, lakeshores, and reserves – and nations around the world have created their own versions of “national parks.” This course will investigate the “national park” idea and its implications for natural and human history. Why has this been called “America’s best idea?” What have been the implications of national park designation for Native Americans? For wildlife? For American history and culture? How do historians answer such questions? (WCore: WCFAH, WE)
       
HIST 206 Homelands and Contested Spaces 4 Credits
Focusing on the methods, processes and outcomes of empire in what are usually referred to as "settler states," this course explores the United States, Australia, and South Africa (among others) from circa 1600 to the present. It compels students to grapple with the complex origins, realities and legacies of what we commonly know today as reservations and homelands. Questions of primary concern in this course are: How and why did these spaces come to be? How and why were they maintained (or not maintained)? Why did certain populations accept or reject the creations of these spaces (and why do these responses change over time)? How do the ancestors of settlers and indigenous populations see and experience these spaces today? The course places a heavy emphasis on critical reading, film interpretation, and research. (WCore: WCFAH, DE)
       
LMW 104 Books That Changed the World 4 Credits
Literature can be a powerful tool for social change. This course examines the international tradition of literary activism in which writers expose injustice, demand change, and inspire solidarity and struggle. (WCore: WCFAH, WE)
       
LMW 105 Communicating Through Writing 4 Credits
This course immerses students into the process of becoming college writers. The workshop oriented class provides an opportunity for students to learn about the following: how rhetorical context shapes writing, how to write about readings, how to understand the information literacy needs and approaches to research, and how to synthesize research into a student’s own writing. By the end of the course, students will have confidence to read, write, research, and communicate in a college context. (WCore: WCFAH, WE)
       
LMW 114 Searching for America 4 Credits
This course explores the rich tradition of modern American literature by featuring some of the most captivating texts and innovative authors, including US minority writers of different ethnic backgrounds. Emphasizing pertinent connections between literature and culture, class discussions will showcase how imaginative writing illuminates, interrogates, and complicates fundamental aspects of American culture. We sill discover that whether literary protagonists dream of freedom, refuge, success, or happiness, they all imagine and experience modern America in uniquely compelling ways. (WCore: WCFAH, DE)
       
LMW 115 The Bible and Literature 4 Credits
We will examine the ongoing cultural dialogue between literature and the Christian Bible, focusing on themes such as creation, temptation, fall, revelation, exodus, testing, persecution, conversion, apocalypse, and the problem of evil. Works by by authors such as Shakespeare, Milton, William Blake, C.S.Lewis, Kafka, and Dostoevsky will be read in the context of relevant passages from the Bible. What light do the Bible and literature throw on perennial human issues? Our basic approach to these texts will be anthropological. (WCore: WCFAH, WE)
       
LMW 116 The Serious Art of Humor 4 Credits
This writing emphasis (WE) Exploration course focuses on humor as a pivotal human experience in the twenty-first century. Students will explore how humor is tied to social contexts, and gain a deep understanding of ways in which humor entertains, instructs, and illuminates political issues. We will read comedy as a cultural text and explore a myriad of subgenres that span geographical contexts (including works by social activist Wanda Sykes, contemporary satirist George Saunders, Indian joke master Kushwant Singh, and cultural critic Barry Sanders), as well as examine styles of comic performances from Ali G’s shock-comedy to Margaret Cho’s political satire. In the process, we will investigate the meanings and effects of humor that have proliferated through social and digital media in the backdrop of such historical events as 9/11 and the Asian Tsunami. Throughout the course, students will reevaluate the concept of humor and ask “What’s funny and why?” (WCore: WCFAH, WE)
       
LMW 121 How Literature Matters Now 4 Credits
This course considers how literature continues to be a vital element of human experience in the 21st century. It may focus on how literary tropes and ideas manifest themselves in other media (in adaptations, allusions, or mashups), on how digital tools have opened up new ways of understanding literary texts, or on how the techniques of literary analysis can help us to understand political narratives. (WCore: WCFAH, WE)
       
LMW 130 Self-Discovery: Film and Literature 4 Credits
Great films and literature testify to the difficulty and the crucial importance of self-discovery. Literary and cinematic protagonists throughout history have struggled to "know thyself," as the oracle commands. The failure to know oneself can have tragic consequences. For us today, film and literature are a challenging and enjoyable route to self-knowledge. This class will study works of literature and cinema which speak to the process of self-discovery. (WCore: WCFAH)
       
LMW 133 Walking 4 Credits
In this arts and humanities course, we will explore the cultural history of walking in the United States, we will walk with intention, and we will write and make art about walking. Some people walk only out of necessity. Others walk to improve their well-being, to see the world, or to save the earth. Depending on who is walking where, when, why, and how, this seemingly simple and ordinary activity can become an adventure, a sport, a crime, an artistic performance, a spiritual practice, a political protest, and more. By studying and practicing the art of walking, we will ask important questions and uncover sometimes uncomfortable truths about ourselves and our world. This course welcomes all people. For our purposes, walking is defined as slow movement across the land. (WCore: WCFAH, WE)
       
LMW 204 Epistolarity: Letters to and From 4 Credits
This writing emphasis (WE) W seminar focuses on letters as both reading and writing texts. Students will read letters both real and imagined (for example Heloise and Abelard, Frederick Douglass, Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, Sojourner Truth, Madame de Stael, M.L.King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, McSweeney’s Letters to People or Entities Unlikely to Respond) across a variety of genres. Students will also write their own letters (love letters, rejection letters, condolence letters, complaint letters, etc.) to themselves, their loved ones, the instructor and classmates, the editors of newspapers or magazines, their communities, etc. The course seeks to combine a deep understanding of rhetoric (awareness of audience, purpose, and information literacy) with literary modes across a broad spectrum of relevance. Letters might include emails, texts, and tweets. The seminar aims to teach students the importance of establishing ethos in conjunction with educating one’s audience. Workshop format, with at least 20 pages of writing, including multiple drafts of each assignment. The course addresses three university-wide learning goals (writing/critical thinking/creative-reflective), plus diversity, because understanding issues of power, subordination, and privilege are inextricable from creating a standpoint from which to speak. (WCore: WCFAH, WE)
       
LMW 202 Worlds of Fantasy  4 Credits
While the fantasy genre has its roots in truly ancient myths and legends, it is very much a product of the twentieth century. In Worlds of Fantasy, we will examine the origins and development of fantasy media in all their forms, from literature to TV, film, and games. Our central concerns will be how fantasy represents the past; how readers, viewers, and gamers experience fantasy; and how fantasy both expresses and challenges oppressive concepts of gender and race. Readings will draw from a diverse range of fantasy authors.  (WCore: WCFAH)
       
LMW 205 Goddesses, Heroes, and Others 4 Credits
From ancient scriptures to contemporary comics, these literary characters-goddesses, heroes, and “others” (figures marginalized by the dominant group)-rule. This course investigates and supports your investigations of these character types. It poses basic questions asked by many literary critics: where do these characters come from and how are they adapted by so many cultures and literary genres? To answer these questions, we’ll delve into current theory and historical research. We’ll do our part to keep goddesses, heroes, and others alive! (WCore: WCFAH, RE)
       
LMW 207 Global Food Movements:  Farms to Social 4 Credits
This course is a study of social movements around food and agriculture in the Global South. From farm worker movements in India to the indigenous fight for environmental justice in Ecuador, this course will investigate how global "food systems" intersect with issues of land, hunger, environment, and the economy. The focus will be on the phenomenon of food crises and the social
movements in response to them. (WCore: WCFAH, WE)
       
LMW 210 Digital Narratives 4 Credits
In this course we will learn how to create stories using digital media such as video narratives and podcasts. Alongside exploring creative elements, we will also reflect critically on how new media shape our understanding of narrative and audiences. The online forum will allow us to be fully immersed in a digital experience. We will create what Anne Burdick calls, "imaginative techno-texts" and critique each other's works online. To develop a common vocabulary, we will read critical texts about narrative and media. In the process, we will analyze the relationship between creator and audience, between form and medium, by asking questions like, "how do the intersections between technology and storytelling affect the ways in which we explore and express our stories?" Students don't need technical proficiency. We'll spend some time going over basic technical and production guidelines. (WCore: WCFAH, WE)
       
LMW 211 Reading and Detection 4 Credits
While investigating the history of the detective genre in film and literature, this course compares the work of interpretation with detective work. It is a famous staple of the detective narrative that the detective explains her or his method of detection, often in considerable philosophical detail. In this course, students will imitate these self-reflective detectives by cultivating and describing their own unique methods of interpretation. They will articulate these methods in essays, discussions, and other linguistic performances. (WCore: WCFAH)
       
LMW 215 Vampire Literature 4 Credits
This course proceeds from the assumption that reading literature bears certain uncanny similarities with vampirism, and that these similarities partly account for the success of the vampire subgenre in popular literature and cinema (the reception of which we will regard as a kind of reading). In particular, literary texts put their readers in a state of passivity that is at once often nerve-wracking and intensely pleasurable. Meanwhile, we will regard writing as a form of vampiric seduction, luring the reading into a receptive state only to strike at the decisive moment and thus achieve its aims (which we will assume are somewhat less violent than the aims of a vampire). (WCore: WCFAH, WE)
       
PHIL 129 Race, Power, and Privilege 4 Credits

No one lives as just an individual but rather all of us live within and interact with systems of identity, oppression, and privilege. Many people find solidarity, belonging, and pride in our relationships with categories such as race but these categories are also sites of oppression and privilege. In this course, we will look at how systems of racism and privilege contribute to how we define ourselves, how we are defined by society, and how the world we know is defined. We will do this from a philosophical perspective. This means that while we will occasionally discuss concrete issues such as affirmative action and equal pay laws we will concentrate on theories of oppression, privilege, intersectionality, and resistance. This means that we will do a lot of abstract thinking in this course. While the topics that we will investigate in this class are different than what you would find in most philosophy courses we will be learning how to think philosophically about important issues that are part of who we are.

We will read a wide variety of sources written by living philosophers of race, some sources from philosophers working in the early twentieth century, as well as quite a bit of work from theorists working in literature and sociology. Looking at sources from different time periods and disciplines will highlight how concepts related to race and power change significantly over time, as well as reflecting that "Philosophy of Race" as a subfield is always interdisciplinary. Assignments and discussions will encourage students to complicate the ways they view their own identity, question the simplified accounts of power that they encounter from the media, engage in social justice work, and reflect upon that work in meaningful ways. (WCore: WCFAH, DE)
       
PHIL  131 Philosophy of Gender and Power 4 Credits
The term "feminist" has almost as many meanings as it has both advocates and detractors. For some, the "feminism" means a radical shift in language, politics, and economics. For some, the term simply means equality. And still for others, the term means witchcraft, sexual deviancy, and the death of the American family. This semester, we will examine how contemporary theorists (many of whom call themselves "feminist") argue the world needs to change in order to make a more just environment for women. In the process, we will read about, write about, and discuss a wide range of issues including structures of power, sexuality and sexual violence, race, masculinity, and beauty norms. The goal for this class is not to decide on one solitary definition of "feminism" but instead to force ourselves to think more critically about how gender structures the world around us and how we can change our future. (WCore: WCFAH, DE)
       
PHIL 134 Philosophy, Identity, and the Self 4 Credits
When we begin to look at the world philosophically, we begin to question the basic assumptions in our lives that we used to ignore. This forces us to start to live in our world with shakier scaffolding than before. However, while this can be uncomfortable and often downright annoying, it also allows us to reflect on what we truly find valuable and encourages to build more meaningful relationships with ourselves, our loved ones, and our world. Throughout this course, we will read philosophical reflections on five core questions in philosophy. Moreover, we will write about and discuss how these questions enter into our own lives and how the ideas of fellow philosophers shake or stabilize our own scaffolding. (WCore: WCFAH, WE)
       
PHIL 208 Philosophy of Love & Sex 4 Credits
Love and sexuality are two of the most crucial and complex aspects of our identities. Moreover, these concepts are often intertwined and sometimes pitted against one another. In this class, we will examine different approaches to this topic from a wide selection of philosophical traditions. Furthermore, we will supplement traditional philosophical readings with analyses of artifacts from popular culture, such as music, movies, and television. All of this will prepare us to ask and respond to various questions, such as “what is love, what is sex, and how are they related?” “In what ways does who and how we love make us who we are?” “How is sexuality a personally and politically important construct?” and “How can love change the world?” (WCore:, WCFAH, WE)
       
PHIL 209 Poverty and Global Justice 3 Credits
Poverty is examined in this course as an ethical issue of the most pressing sort. Reviewing various ethical theories and conducting a survey of some of the most commonly used definitions of poverty, we focus on this question: what justifies, ethically, politically and economically, if at all, allowing so many human being to remain mired in extreme conditions of deprivation (i.e., poverty that kills)? Arguably, we could act in such a way as to change such conditions to the benefit of the humans who are otherwise the victims of these unchanged, impoverished conditions. (WCore: WCFAH)
       
PHIL 216 Ethical Issues in Health and Healthcare 4 Credits
The basic or human right to life enjoys widespread endorsement, though just what sort of life is considered a basic right may vary from one society to another. While exploring some of these varieties of the conception of "life" which all human beings putatively have a right to (and thus someone or other has a duty to support such a claim), we will focus in this course on the role which health and adequate health care play, anywhere, as necessities, for human beings who are trying to enjoy the substance of such a basic right to life. Other necessities for a substantive life as a matter of right will be discussed as well. (WCore: WCFAH)
       
PHIL 221 Ethics of Diversity 4 Credits
In the context of philosophy, ethics is the study of moral decisions and moral actions. To put it more simply, the aim of this course is to ask the question "What ought I do?" Throughout this term, we will ask this question again and again, sometimes in the context of concrete decisions and sometimes in the context of more abstract theories of right and wrong. In the process, we will read the work of authors who are trying to answer the same questions, investigate their works thoroughly, and analyze their ideas and our own though writing and class discussion. (WCore: WCFAH, DE)
       
THTR 180 Acting I 3 Credits
A study of the acting techniques of Stanislavski, Strasberg, and Hagen applied to monologues and scene. (WCore: WCFAH)
       
THTR 255 Script Analysis 3 Credits
This course studies methodologies of scriptanalysis to help students develop greater skill in the technical and theoretical skills of script analysis using a formalist approach. Using dramatic literature from naturalism to the avant garde, students will dissect how the plays work structurally. Analytical methods provide students with glimpses of plays' underlying structural principles, leading to deeper understanding of overall meaning. The course offers general guidelines for reading and thinking about plays and understanding the basic potentials of a play's construction. (WCore; WCFAH)
       
WCFAH 127 Infinite Variety 3 Credits

An introductory course to the art of acting and communication through performance. It covers the study of basic acting techniques, the value of storytelling, modes of communication (verbal, physical, text and subtext), and improvisation.
Students will learn a lexicon of terms and techniques related to rehearsing, performing, and critiquing live performance and storytelling. Students will be challenged to access and deliver the physical, emotional, and psychological aspects of their character(s). (WCore: WCFAH) 
WCFAH 132 Sound, Music, and Technology 3 Credits

"The history of the music industry is inevitably also the story of the development of technology. From the player piano to the vinyl disc, from reel-to-reel tape to the cassette, from the CD to the digital download, these formats and devices changed not only the way music was consumed, but the very way artists created it." Edgar Bronfman, Jr. former CEO of Warner Music Group. Using this quote as a guide, but expanding it to include music and sound as a whole, not just the music industry, this course will broadly examine the effect that technology has had on music and sound after WWII. It will cover music and sound in popular music, art music, film and interactive media, music of other cultures, and sound art and sound installations. The class format is based on a cycle of listening, reading, and creating.  Students will first listen to and discuss works that employ, are made possible, or were fundamentally changed because of a paradigm shift brought about due to a technological innovation.  Students will then read and learn about one particular innovation and finally demonstrate their knowledge of this innovation by creating short musical or sound works of their own and writing about the relationship between technology and their own work or by composing short, focused essays about the relationship between a technological shift and works listened to in class. This class is open to all majors, regardless of prior musical knowledge; however, basic computer skills are required. (WCore: WCFAH)
       
WCFAH 207 Humor and Philosophy 4 Credits
Most people love to laugh-but why? And what makes something funny? Is there a secret to someone or something being  comical? And what's the purpose of humor and laughter, anyway? Finally-can anything be funny? Are some forms of humor actually immoral, and are we bad people for laughing at some jokes? Or is humor a fictional holiday from everyday life, where anything and everything is allowed? In this course we'll philosophically explore these questions and others about the nature, purpose, value, and possible limits of humor in everyday life. (WCore: WCFAH)
       
WCFAH 213 Revisioning (Dis)ability 4 Credits
This course has been designed to provide an in-depth exploration of social justice issues for people with disabilities.  Through a series of visual images, including documentaries and digital photographs, students will examine the disturbing history of cruel treatment through ‘tyranny of the majority’ toward those with disabilities.  Topics include the Eugenics Movement, forced institutionalization, and continued restraint and seclusion.  Students will also delve into the social changes brought about by the Disability Rights Movement as well as the barriers to full inclusion that exist today. (WCore: WCFAH, WE)
       
WCFAH 219 The Music of Two Ring Cycles 4 Credits
In this course, students will examine music composed for two of the greatest fantasy epics ever created, Richard Wagner's 4-opera Der Ring des Niebelungen and Howard Shore's soundtracks to the 3-film version of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Comparisons between the literary content of the cycles are inevitable, from the subject matter to parallel plot developments and even the fantasy creatures that inhabit each world, and these will be studied in the course. In addition to these correspondences, the composers of each cycle used very similar compositional devices to organize the musical content, providing continuity over 10+ hours of music while simultaneously clearly delineating characters, objects, emotional states and more abstract ideas. Students will present their own specialized research on diverse topics relating to the two cycles to their classmates. (WCore: WCFAH, RE)
       
WRIT 110 First Year Writing Workshop 4 Credits
As students, we engage in a variety of academic conversations across multiple contexts. We engage with others in these communities to listen, share, inform, and persuade. The purpose of this course is to help students develop the confidence as writers entering academic conversations. We will approach this in several ways. We will develop mindful reading strategies. That is, how to make deliberate decisions on which reading strategies to use across various contexts and purposes. We will develop and reflect on our writing process, in which we plan, draft, share, and revise our writing. And, we will explore rhetorical choices in written and oral communication. That is, uncover not just what the writer and speaker says, but how the writing and speech is put together. We will analyze the academic conversations for rhetorical principles including audience, purpose, and argumentative strategies. (WCore: WCFAH)