About Clothes: Styles, Histories, Activisms, Poetics
ENGL 332
Fall 2025
| Section:
01
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| Crosslisting:
FGSS 333 |
| Course Cluster and Certificates: Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory Certificate |
What kinds of work go into the making and wearing of clothes, and what kinds of work do clothes do? This course is a chance to think together about how a range scholars, journalists, curators, and others have written about, handled, studied, preserved, and displayed clothing. At the same time, we will pay close attention to what it means for you to live in relation with your clothes. In conversation with works of literature, historical and curatorial scholarship, visual art, reporting, activism, and more, we will investigate clothes as objects of imagination and resistance, as well as elements of material culture. As we think about the global circuits that have informed various fashion systems, we will consider how particular textiles and textures, cuts of cloth, and racialized, gendered, and sexualized ideas of style emerged in conjunction with particular forms of labor -- and will also note how sustained attention to this multi-billion-dollar business has been devalued historically. Over the semester, you will conduct your own writing experiments at the intersections of language, image, identities, and the materiality-ephemerality of clothing. |
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| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
HA CHUM |
| Course Format: Seminar | Grading Mode: Student Option |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
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Fulfills a Requirement for: (English)(Social, Cultural and Critical Theory Certificate) |
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Past Enrollment Probability: 50% - 74% |
| SECTION 01 |
Major Readings: Wesleyan RJ Julia Bookstore
Will include works by Horace Ballard, Anne Cheng, Robin Givhan, Tanisha Ford, Jamaica Kincaid, Catherine McKinley, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Lou Taylor, Virginia Woolf, and others
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Examinations and Assignments:
Essays, class presentations |
Additional Requirements and/or Comments:
Contributes to the fulfillment of ENGL major requirements: LH3, TH, elective. |
| Instructor(s): Cohen,Lisa Times: ..T.... 01:20PM-04:10PM; Location: TBA |
| Total Enrollment Limit: 16 | | SR major: 4 | JR major: 4 | | |
| Seats Available: 16 | GRAD: X | SR non-major: 3 | JR non-major: 3 | SO: 2 | FR: X |
| Drop/Add Enrollment Requests | | | | | |
| Total Submitted Requests: 0 | 1st Ranked: 0 | 2nd Ranked: 0 | 3rd Ranked: 0 | 4th Ranked: 0 | Unranked: 0 |
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