Summer 2012 Class Schedule

The Center for Continuing Education at Sarah Lawrence College offers several credit courses throughout the year designed specifically for adult learners. These courses are taught by outstanding Sarah Lawrence faculty members, and members of the community can take them for credit or audit them.

To enroll in any of these summer seminars, please contact cce@sarahlawrence.edu or call (914) 395-2205. Enrollment is limited and on a space-available basis.

Studies in 19th and 20th Century Fiction

Ilja Wachs
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9:30-11:30 a.m.
June 5-July 19
5 Credits

In this course, we will read such major modern authors as Kafka, Marques, Austen, Twain, Melville, Stendhal, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy. The emphasis will be upon a close reading of texts with a view toward enhancing the pleasure and understanding that students take from reading great works of fiction.

Ilja Wachs has been a member of the literature faculty at Sarah Lawrence College since 1965. From 1980-85, he served as the Dean of the College, and holds the Wachs Chair for Excellence in Teaching and Donning. He is the author of Dickens: The Orphan Condition (1999), and specializes in works of the 19th century, with an emphasis on the relation between the individual and the social world.

Drawing: Seeing and Thinking

John O'Connor
Wednesdays and Thursdays, 2:30-5:30 p.m.
June 6- July 19
5 Credits

Drawing is an endlessly exciting art form that encourages experimentation and embraces mistakes. It naturally exploits the relationships between seeing and thinking. This course will challenge what you think of as drawing. You will learn about the tools of traditional drawing (paper, graphite, ink, charcoal, conte, etc.) and how to translate what you see onto paper. Simultaneously, you will begin to learn how to express yourself individually through drawing — how will your drawings be different from everyone else's? We will begin with the fundamentals of drawing through observation (line, value, space) and move into more complex subjects and combinations of materials, even touching on collage and abstraction, and finishing with a large-scale, independent project. Each week, we will work in new ways, continuing to build on what came before, often approaching similar subject matter in new ways. We will not keep our subjects at a distance, but will try to connect with them, move around and through them, deconstruct them — really understand what we are drawing. Ultimately, what can your drawings reveal beyond what we all plainly see? While we may all be looking at and drawing the same thing, you will be asked to find your own solutions to problems, take your drawings in new and unexpected directions, and extrapolate from what you know and learn. What you learn in this class — creative problem-solving and careful rendering of the visual world — will transcend this class.

This course is suitable for all levels. Work outside of class is required each week. Studio practice will be reinforced through discussion, occasional written work, readings, slides, and gallery/museum visits.

John J. O'Connor (MFA, MS, Pratt Institute) attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and was a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts grant in painting and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. He teaches drawing and painting at Sarah Lawrence College and Princeton University. In 2011, he had a solo exhibition at Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn, and has also had solo exhibitions at Martin Asbaek Projects, in Copenhagen, Denmark, and Fleisher Ollman Gallery in Philadelphia. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Weatherspoon Museum, Southern Methodist University, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art. He currently has a studio at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation.

Hollywood History: Interpreting the U.S. Past in Film

Jim Cullen
Mondays and Wednesdays, 6-8 p.m.
June 4 to July 18
5 Credits

"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend," a newspaper editor says at the end of the classic 1962 John Ford Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. But what happens when there's more than one legend? In this course, we will visit important moments in American history and compare different film versions of the same event or period. In looking at these films, reading about and discussing their historical context, and writing about them, we will learn a little about American history and a lot about the way our perception of events is a matter of who is making the history — and when that history is being made. In so doing, we will strengthen reading, writing, and thinking skills applicable to the humanities as a whole.

Jim Cullen (BA, Tufts University; MA, PhD, Brown University) is a history teacher at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, and has also taught at Harvard, Brown, and Sarah Lawrence. He is the author of 10 books, including Born in the USA: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition (1997) and The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (2003). His current work-in-progress, Sensing History, looks at Hollywood actors as historians and is slated for publication by Oxford University Press in late 2012. You can read his blog at www.amhistnow.blogspot.com.

Body Politics: A 20th Century Cultural History of the United States

Lyde Sizer
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 6-8 p.m.
June 5-July 19
5 Credits

Historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg argues that “in the 20th century, the body has become the central personal project of American girls.” Increasingly in U.S. culture, the body has come to be seen as the ultimate expression of the self. This course will analyze the emergence of this consuming anxiety against the backdrop of other conversations about women's (and, to some extent, men's) bodies: as workers, as mothers and fathers, as public figures, as sexual beings. What political meanings—about race, class, age, shape, disability, sexuality—have been invested in the body in the 20th century? Has that changed over time? Using cultural criticism, novels, and films, as well as history, we will begin at the turn of the 20th century and continue until the turn of the 21st, exploring the larger meanings of these shifts and anxieties for U.S. political culture.

Lyde Sizer (BA, Yale; PhD, Brown University) is a professor of U.S. cultural and intellectual history at Sarah Lawrence College, and has taught at Connecticut College and Harvard University. She is the author of The Political Work of Northern Women Writers in the American Civil War Era, 1850-1872 (2000) and editor, with Jim Cullen, of The Civil War Era: An Anthology of Sources (2005); and chapters in Love, Sex, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History (1999) and Houses Divided: Gender and the Civil War (1992). She has been teaching 19th and 20th century American cultural and intellectual history—with a focus on women's history—as well as courses on the overlap with European intellectual history since 1994.