CWL 581

Fall 2014 All Classes

All Classes

Seminar Lit Themes

Credit: 4 hours.

Study of a theme or type (the Faust myth, the romantic hero, etc.) to discover its essential components in all the literatures studied and the significance of national variations. The subject of the seminar varies each term.

May be repeated to a maximum of 12 hours if topics vary.

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CWL 581 class schedule data for fall 2014
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	51331	Lecture-Discussion	AWS	2:00PM -4:50PM	M	1026 Lincoln Hall	Stenport, A	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/25/14-12/10/14 Section Title: Seminar Lit Theses Section Info: Meets with GER576/SCAN593 Topic -Imagining the Arctic Instructor: Anna Westerstahl Stenport Imagining the Arctic 'The Arctic' has historically been imagined by Southerners as remote and desolate, as a white or blank space upon which to project dreams and fears, while the circumpolar region has provided a bountiful home for indigenous populations for millennia. Focus on the Arctic is increasing in the wake of climate change, accelerated resource extraction, and augmented geopolitical tension. Through the burgeoning field of Critical Arctic Studies, humanistic inquiry is contributing new ways to understanding the region's past, present, and future, by providing a rich set of interpretive approaches that counter dominant epistemological models of the Arctic influenced by policy generation and the natural sciences.This interdisciplinary course investigates representations of the Arctic in literature, art, cinema, media, and scientific and geographical writing over the past century and a half, spanning material from North America (documentaries, experimental cinema, and Hollywood features by Robert Flaherty, James Balog, Stan Brakhage, and Howard Hawks), Britain(figurations of the lost Franklin expedition; films by John Akomfrah), continental Europe, and the Nordic Region. Interpretive approaches include ecocriticism; post-colonialism; indigenous studies; visual, film and media theory; and Cold War studies. Open to graduate students from any humanities or social sciences discipline, the course emphasizes cross-disciplinary interaction and engagement. In addition to a final research project, the course will include the creation of digitally networked content and approaches to building a portfolio of Arctic-related teaching material of relevance to students' primary disciplines. The course will be taught by Professor Anna Westerstahl Stenport (aws@illinois.edu <mailto:aws@illinois.edu> ), a scholar of Arctic, Scandinavian, and European cinema, literature, and media. Her books include _Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic_ (forthcoming Edinburgh UP, 2014), _The Arctic Imagined and Ecotheory_ (McGill-Queen's UP, expected); and _Locating August Strindberg's Prose: Modernism, Transnationalism, Setting_ (Toronto UP, 2010). Professor Stenport has pursed Arctic archival research in several locations in Europe and North America, and field research in the high Arctic at Svalbard, Norway. She is one of the originators of the innovative interdisciplinary SAO-LAS Stockholm Summer Arctic Program, which is set to take place in northernmost Sweden in summer 2014.