ENGL 300

Spring 2016 All Classes

All Classes

Writing About Lit Text&Culture

SHOW FINAL EXAM SCHEDULE

Credit: 3 hours.

Writing-intensive, variable topic course designed to improve English majors' ability to write clear, well-organized, analytically sound and persuasively argued essays relevant to literary studies. Introduces students to some strategies of literary criticism and research through examination of critical texts appropriate to course topic. For majors only.

Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement; one year of college literature or consent of instructor.

This course satisfies the General Education Criteria in Fall 2022 for:

Advanced Composition

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ENGL 300 class schedule data for spring 2016
CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
32119	Lecture-Discussion	C	10:00AM -10:50AM	MWF	104 English Building	Loughran, T	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/19/16-05/04/16 Degree Notes: Advanced Composition course. Section Title: Adventures in Posthumanism Section Info: Topic Section C: Adventures in Posthumanism: (How It Feels To Be a) Human, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Machine How does a hawk (or a cow, or a dog) think? Can a person fall in love with her computer’s operating system? What would it be like to be born a rock, or an eggplant? These are the kinds of questions we’ll think about in this course, as we watch films, read novels and memoirs, play games, and read scholarship together. The humanities have in recent years taken a counterintuitive turn into what is now sometimes called the “post-human” or the “non-human.” This means we find ourselves increasingly interested in trying to think in ways that put human life less at the center of the universe (or at the top of the planetary feeding chain). In the place of the vertical feeding chain, more horizontal relations are imagined among people, animals, extraterrestrial “aliens,” the environment, and artificial intelligences (like Siri, Alexa, and Cortana). Some primary texts we might consider include: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Shelly Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, Spike Jonze’s film Her, AMC’s popular television series The Walking Dead, Helen McDonald’s H is for Hawk, J.M. Coetzee’s The Life of Animals, Michel Faber’s Under the Skin (along with Jonathan Glazer’s film adaption), and a videogame or two (a good candidate would be From Software’s Bloodborne). Secondary reading is likely to include short excerpts from feminist, queer, postcolonial, and “nonhumanist” scholars such as Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, Jane Bennett, Eduardo Kohn, Gayatri Spivak, Mel Chen, and others. It is strongly recommended that all English and Teaching of English majors take ENGL 300 and ENGL 301 BEFORE taking any other 300- or 400-level courses.
32121	Lecture-Discussion	P	11:00AM -12:15PM	TR	115 English Building	Murison, J	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/19/16-05/04/16 Degree Notes: Advanced Composition course. Section Title: Invent Privacy in 19th C Amer Section Info: Topic Section P: Inventing Privacy in Nineteenth-Century America “To believe your own thought,” urged Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1841, “to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius.” Emerson’s famous definition of genius is a tall order in any era, but perhaps even more so in our own. How do we find our “private heart,” crowded as we are by others’ voices, as we bounce between Twitter and 24-hour news channels and reality shows? Even more than that, what is a “private heart” and does it even exist in such isolation from the rest of society? We often take for granted that we know what privacy is and what we mean when we invoke the “private,” but as any reasonable sense of it erodes in our era of social media and digital data collection, it might be worthwhile to stop and consider further what it is and whether it has value. To that end, we will return to Emerson’s era—the era in which a language of a “private heart” was built—and follow how literature invoked, constructed, and idealized the private, and how literature and culture, by the end of the century, bequeathed a theory of a “right to privacy” that shaped twentieth-century legal culture. In pursuing these themes, we will read such authors as Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Jacobs, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Charles Chesnutt, and Henry James. As this is a writing intensive course, we will also explore the pleasures of close reading and archival research, the complex and enabling terms of literary theory, and the construction of analytically strong and stylistically compelling arguments, both for academic work and the writing you will do beyond your academic lives.
47579	Lecture-Discussion	Q	12:30PM -1:45PM	TR	131 English Building	Wright, D	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/19/16-05/04/16 Degree Notes: Advanced Composition course. Section Title: Creative Non-Fiction Section Info: Topic Section Q: Creative Non-Fiction In this course, we will read a range of autobiographical and biographical writing that can be qualified as “creative” or “literary” non-fiction. We will explore the texts as celebrations of life as well as interrogations of identity. We will also examine the texts as constructed narratives, or as constructed “truth,” investigating the rhetorical strategies employed by the writers to forge their diverse identities on the page. As this is an advanced composition course with a focus on writing about literature, assignments will include three formal papers (7-9 pages) with drafts, multiple shorter response papers, and in-class writing assignments. Students will also do an oral presentation. It is strongly recommended that all English and Teaching of English majors take ENGL 300 and ENGL 301 BEFORE taking any other 300- or 400-level courses.
32118	Lecture-Discussion	S	2:00PM -3:15PM	TR	131 English Building	Nazar, H	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/19/16-05/04/16 Degree Notes: Advanced Composition course. Section Title: British Women's Writing Section Info: Topic Section S: Sex and Revolution: British Women's Writing, Mary Wollstonecraft to Jane Austen All of Europe was spellbound in 1793 when the French revolutionaries marched their king and (some months later) their queen to the guillotine or “national razor” and chopped off their heads. In the ensuing Reign of Terror, some 40,000 “traitors of the revolution” were executed. No nation followed the events in France with greater interest than Britain, France’s close neighbor and oftentimes opponent. The French revolution was greeted with unbridled enthusiasm by British progressives (in its early phases, before the Terror) and with horror by conservatives. Indeed, some of the most important contours of the left-right political divide, as we understand it today, were established in Britain during the 1790s, a decade that saw the publication of landmarks of modern conservatism such as Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and of liberalism such as Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791) and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). This course considers how British women writers of the period responded to the ideological upheaval generated by the French revolution, and how they transformed the debate about the “rights of man” into a vigorous one about women’s rights—as citizens, moral agents, and members of civil society. Some of the most interesting discussions of women’s place in society and their capacity for self-government were conducted through the medium of literature (as opposed to philosophical and political treatises), and especially the novel, a genre that, in this period, was importantly by, for, and about women. Our readings, therefore, will be primarily literary though we will also examine such key political treatises as Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Novels include Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman; or Maria, Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney, and Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. It is strongly recommended that all English and Teaching of English majors take ENGL 300 and ENGL 301 BEFORE taking any other 300- or 400-level courses.