Fall 2013 Course Catalog - School of the Museum of Fine Arts

Fall 2013 Course Catalog
14
Field Studies in Art
Education:5-12
EDS 0180 MU (4 Credits)
Pamela Bower-Basso
W
10:30 AM - 1:30 PM
C110
Students participate in school and community art programs for young people in grades
five through twelve. Fieldwork includes internships at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
and focused observations one day a week in public school settings. Emphasis is placed
on reflection and discussion of lesson planning and presentation, assessment strategies,
classroom management, children’s artistic development, and student diversity. Course work
includes individual field site visits, observation papers, readings, reflection papers, research,
and presentations. Open only to MAT Art ED students, limited exceptions are made with
permission of instructor.
English I: The Fictional Frame
ENGS 0001 A (4 Credits)
Ted Weesner
R
9:00 AM - 12:00 PM
C111
This course will allow you the opportunity to write creatively (story, scene, script) while
developing the critical tools to interpret both you own and others’ work. We will read, interpret
and seek inspiration from a range of contemporary texts, including short fiction (Junot Diaz,
Judy Budnitz, George Saunders), film (Andrew Bujalski, Werner Herzog) and music as well
as your own stories. In examining what makes for a successful narrative and constructing
your own, you will have the tools to create essays and stories that are animated by theoretical
vigor, your experience, your voice. Please visit: http://www.ase.tufts.edu/visualcriticalstudies/
English/EnglishCourses.html
English I: Last Things
ENGS 0001 B (4 Credits)
Adam Spellmire
W
5:30 PM - 8:30 PM
C111
We will read and write about literature that imagines catastrophe. Although we will discuss
the post-apocalyptic novel, the course will consider last things in larger literary and historical
contexts as well. How do artists represent the end of human experience? What happens at
the end? Who remains? What cultural anxieties help to produce these texts? Why does a
disaster genre persist? What are its central concerns? In order to investigate these questions
we will read Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett, Cormac McCarthy, and others. The reading
assignments, though, will act as prompts for your own writing, and the course will focus on
your essays.
English I: Reconfigurations:
Representing History &
Memory
ENGS 0001 D (4 Credits)
Cheryl Alison
W
2:00 PM - 5:00 PM
C111
Reconfigurations will consider the way that the stories we tell about ourselves and our pasts
(our histories, and indeed our memories) are the results of a making or composition (whether
it be artistic, conscious or unconscious, strategic, or by way of happenstance), that is also
inevitably a reconfiguration: it vies with, exists in relation to, or retells other such narratives.
Modes of representation matter and how we represent a thing often equals its reality for us:
the way that it becomes accessible to us or even gestures toward an inaccessibility. This
class will consider the categories of history and memory, putting them in conversation with
each other and teasing out how we understand these two categories. We will approach
history and memory via story, understanding representation as inextricable from both of
these. Please visit: http://www.ase.tufts.edu/visualcriticalstudies/English/EnglishCourses.html
English I: Film as Literature
ENGS 0001 E (4 Credits)
Micah Nathan
T
5:30 PM - 8:30 PM
C111
This course will provide a “close-viewing” approach to contemporary cinema and literature,
analyzing film, screenplays, and short fiction, as well as writing (and rewriting) original short
stories. The purpose of this course is three-fold: 1. To analyze story structure within cinematic
context 2. To discuss and debate where cinema and written fiction converge and diverge 3.
To use these lessons to produce short fiction with an emphasis on the vivid and the visceral.
Students will be asked to workshop and revise their stories, and I will provide extensive
written comments as well. Ultimately, students will learn about structure, foreshadowing,
character development, and thematic connections to story via both cinema and prose. We
will cover Scorsese, Wes Anderson, Haruki Murakami, J. D. Salinger, and John Cheever
as a basis for comparison and contrast. Also, we’ll be outlining an original screenplay as a
group exercise, to give students the experience of crafting a story in real-time.