ENGL 396

Fall 2016 Part of Term 1

Part of Term 1
Aug 22-Dec 7

Honors Seminar I

SHOW FINAL EXAM SCHEDULE

Credit: 3 hours.

Themes, movements, and forms in British, American, and Anglophone literature.

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 396 class schedule data for fall 2016
CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
32226	Lecture-Discussion Lecture-Discussion	E E	1:00PM -2:50PM 1:00PM -3:15PM	W M	English Building English Building	Newcomb, J Newcomb, J	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/22/16-12/07/16 Special Approval: Departmental Approval Required Section Title: Amer Cinema & Modern Cityscape Section Info: Topic Section E: Twentieth Century Blocks: American Cinema and the Modern Cityscape The skylines of the early 20th-century city engendered new ways of experiencing height, size, speed, noise, density, and social difference. The same could be said of the emerging entertainment form of cinema. Drawing upon film, art history, architecture, and urban planning, this seminar will trace the closely intertwined history of American cinema and the modern cityscape. We’ll see how the vertically expanding city both beguiled American filmmakers, artists, and writers to imagine a modernity without boundaries; and challenged their capacity to address vast new measures of time and distance. We’ll begin by examining visually spectacular cityscape films of the late silent era, such as Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last and Speedy, Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, and King Vidor’s The Crowd. These films offer critical examinations of machine-age mass society while still preserving a strong sense of the modern city as a material and symbolic site of possibility, renewal, and progress. Then we’ll trace some influential portrayals of the cinematic cityscape between 1945 and 1980, including film noir (The Naked City) and 1950s movies involving women emerging into/merging with the city skyline (Rear Window, Breakfast at Tiffany’s). We’ll end by examining two of the most important genres of Hollywood from the 1970s through the 1990s: 1.) Dystopian dramas of the contemporary city (The French Connection, Taxi Driver, Boyz n the Hood), filmed in gritty urban locations, that used the unstable visual and social textures of the “inner city” to grapple with the complex racial and class dynamics underlying the rhetoric of “urban decline” and “white flight.” 2). Period films of epic scope (The Godfather films, Chinatown, Once Upon a Time in America) that employed crime film conventions and meticulous production design to recreate nostalgically “lost” modern cities at an ambiguous historical moment in which vertical metropolis was giving way to horizontal postmodern sprawl. Like other film courses, this one features a two-hour required weekly “lab” session for screenings. There will be informal responses to readings and films, a class presentation, a short essay based on close reading, and a longer research paper.
32223	Lecture-Discussion	N	10:00AM -11:50AM	T	English Building	Nazar, H	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/22/16-12/07/16 Special Approval: Departmental Approval Required Section Title: Woman Reader in Brit Fiction Section Info: Topic Section N: The Woman Reader in British Fiction, Charlotte Lennox to Jane Austen In 2001, the acclaimed American novelist Jonathan Franzen publicly mocked Oprah Winfrey’s popular book club when he was invited to participate in it (Franzen described Oprah’s book selections as “schmaltzy” and “one-dimensional”). Unsurprisingly, the TV host rescinded her invitation. In the furor that followed, cultural commentators were divided about the merits not only of highbrow and popular fiction but also of male and female styles of reading. Franzen and his defenders, it became apparent, objected not only to Winfrey’s book list but also to her predominantly female audience, which seemed to read books differently from men—to cope with life, or as a consciousness-raising exercise, rather than as serious works of art. Such anxiety about how, in addition to what, women read is by no means new. It has a long history, dating back to at least the eighteenth century, when women entered the literary marketplace in growing numbers as consumers and producers of literature. This course considers the pivotal figure of the female reader and interpreter as it unfolds in the literature and culture of the long eighteenth century. It asks why writers of all stripes—men and women, working in genres as varied as fiction, popular journalism, and educational and moral treatises—were obsessed with the question of what eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century women read. And it considers how various women writers responded to the fears and prescriptions embedded within this cultural obsession. Our core readings will be novels that take as their heroines highly impressionable young women readers: works like Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752), the heroine of which imagines that she lives in a French chivalric romance; Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), which revolves around a character who becomes sexually inflamed by reading sentimental novels; Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray (1804), the eponymous heroine of which is so committed to revolutionary philosophy that she refuses to marry the man she loves; and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818), which takes as its heroine a young woman who cannot tell where a Gothic novel ends and real life begins. We will conclude the course with a partial viewing of the ITV miniseries, Lost in Austen (2008), which traces the fortunes of a Jane Austen fan who gets a chance to become a character in her favorite novel, Pride and Prejudice.
40420	Lecture-Discussion	Q	12:30PM -1:45PM	TR	English Building	Soto Crespo, R	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/22/16-12/07/16 Special Approval: Departmental Approval Required Section Title: The Anglophone Caribbean Novel Section Info: Topic Section Q: The Anglophone Caribbean Novel This honors seminar will examine the Anglophone Caribbean novel and its particular literary concerns. These concerns include (but are not limited to) notions of exile, the importance of language, the articulation of identity in varying post-colonial states, and representations of gender, race and ethnicity. The class will also analyze the socio-political events in particular nations and the ways in which these events influence writing in the archipelago. The class will examine three main trends in Caribbean literature: bildungsroman, diaspora, and multiculturalism.