ENGL 398

Fall 2015 All Classes

All Classes

Honors Seminar III

SHOW FINAL EXAM SCHEDULE

Credit: 3 hours.

Major British, American, and Anglophone authors. Each seminar considers one or two major authors.

May be repeated. Prerequisite: A 3.33 grade-point average or consent of the English Department's Director of Undergraduate Studies. Restricted to English and Rhetoric majors.

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ENGL 398 class schedule data for fall 2015
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	43073	Lecture-Discussion	E	1:00PM -2:50PM	W	123 English Building	Somerville, S	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/24/15-12/09/15 Special Approval: Departmental Approval Required Section Title: James Baldwin Section Info: Topic Section E: James Baldwin Harlem, Paris, Istanbul. Novelist, essayist, playwright, poet. Preacher, civil rights activist, expatriate writer. Defying any single classification, genre, or location, James Baldwin (1924-1987) and his writing continue to complicate the ways we think about twentieth-century American literature, especially the overlapping histories of African American literature and lesbian/gay literature. This course will offer an opportunity to study Baldwin?s writing in depth, including works such as Notes of a Native Son, Giovanni?s Room, Another Country, The Fire Next Time, Going to Meet the Man, Just Above My Head and Go Tell It On the Mountain. At the same time, we will consider the literary, cultural, and political contexts of his writing, including the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, the early lesbian and gay liberation movement, and the Black Power movement. Along the way, we will read selected critical and theoretical scholarship that sheds light on the politics of race, sexuality, and representation in Baldwin?s work.
	64561	Lecture-Discussion	F	2:00PM -3:15PM	MW	115 English Building	Stevens, A	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/24/15-12/09/15 Special Approval: Departmental Approval Required Section Title: Shakespeare in his Context Section Info: Topic Section F: Shakespeare in his Context We all know the role Shakespeare continues to occupy within the Western canon. In this English honors seminar, I would have us set aside Shakespeare?s formidable reputation as the ?greatest writer in the history of English literature? and instead concentrate on Shakespeare the actor and playwright who made his considerable living writing for the London professional theater from roughly 1580 to 1611. The city of London, Shakespeare?s fellow actors, the physical spaces of the Globe and the Blackfriars playhouses, and any number of material and cultural factors?props, music, special effects, audience expectations?shaped the plays Shakespeare wrote and consequently inform the printed play editions that we now read. So too did Shakespeare imitate, collaborate, and engage with the many talented writers who also supplied plays to the various theater companies of early modern London. Shakespeare modeled Hamlet on Thomas Kyd?s early blockbuster The Spanish Tragedy, for example, and Thomas Middleton in turn drew upon both of these plays when he wrote The Revenger?s Tragedy. At other times, the relationships amongst the plays we read might appear to be less obvious?did John Ford have Romeo and Juliet in mind when he wrote a very different tale of forbidden love, ?Tis Pity She?s a Whore? What insights emerge when we read Christopher Marlowe?s The Jew of Malta alongside The Merchant of Venice? Our study of Renaissance ?original practices??the key theatrical conventions and staging conditions that existed in Shakespeare?s time?will furthermore allow us to see these plays as living documents intended for performance. Emphases will therefore include an attention to the plays in their earliest moment of composition, rehearsal, performance, publication, and reception, as well as to their production histories: that is, any (although not all) of the plays we?ll read have been in continuous production for 400 years, including recent popular film adaptations, and not just in the English-speaking West. What does this history of performance, adaptation, and revision tell us? Do the plays continue to offer us insight into the social world we ourselves inhabit? The class will be conducted as a seminar-discussion. Our primary texts are listed above (possibly subject to some revision; secondary texts to be determined). Although some of these assignments might be tweaked, evaluation will be based on participation, including a willingness to read lines out loud and block scenes in class; one group performance project; and three papers, one of which will be revised into a longer final seminar paper.