The World of the Ballad Faculty Director: Dr. Jennifer Goodman Wollock | Department of English STudents: Grace Kelly Brock West Casey Robertson Amy Arndt This two-week seminar was an intensive introduction to the study of the ballad, with the goal of familiarizing a new generation of student-scholars with this fundamental and too often neglected genre. Students assessed the impact of the ballad on English and American literature, international connections, and as an ongoing vehicle of cultural transmission across time, space, gender and classes from the Middle Ages to the present.
Golden Age Theory Laboratory: Reading Spanish Renaissance Classics through a Postmodern Lens Faculty Director: Dr. Hilaire Kallendorf | Department of Hispanic Studies STudents: Maci Greene Jackie Marcheschi This two-week seminar was devoted to creating a “theory laboratory” where students could experiment with applying a variety of postmodern literary theories (feminism, Marxism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, New Historicism, biopolitics, book history, etc.) to Renaissance Spanish literary texts. This involved teaching the basic principles of each of these theories as well as introducing the students, often for the first time, to primary texts by Cervantes, Quevedo, Calderon, Zayas, and other classic authors of the Spanish Golden Age. The process was cumulative in the sense that each primary text could potentially be analyzed in light of any and all theories discussed, in order to see which theory or theories might be most applicable in each case (our motto was Cinderella’s: “if the shoe fits, wear it”). The course thus sought to address the frequent disconnect between theory and practice by integrating theoretical abstractions with a hands-on, get-messy willingness to experiment in the literary realm.
Glasscock Undergraduate Summer Scholars Program • 29