ENGL 396

Spring 2016 All Classes

All Classes

Honors Seminar I

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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 spring 2016
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	32114	Lecture-Discussion	C	10:00AM -11:50AM	W	113 English Building	Wright, D	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/19/16-05/04/16 Special Approval: Departmental Approval Required Section Title: Race, Gender & Representation Section Info: Topic Section C: America at the Nadir: Race, Gender and Representation from Twain to Hurston This course will use a variety of disciplinary approaches to examine cultural production from the Reconstruction through the Harlem Renaissance. We will explore the perceived role, or “place,” of blacks, women and the poor in US society as they were represented in popular forms of expression (literature, film, theater and music) at the turn of the twentieth century, investigating themes such as the use of dialect and representation; “black face” minstrelsy and its legacy; “manifest destiny” and modernity; etc. Authors and texts will include Charles Chesnutt, The Birth of a Nation, Scott Joplin’s ragtime opera Treemonisha, Gertrude Stein, “The Waste Land,” Jean Toomer, Sophie Treadwell, and Gone with the Wind, among others. The criticism and scholarship we read will allow students to understand the larger context of the primary works, bringing historical and socio-political issues to bear on the study of the literature.
	32113	Lecture-Discussion	P	11:00AM -12:15PM	TR	59A English Building	Curry, R	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/19/16-05/04/16 Special Approval: Departmental Approval Required Section Title: Theories of Popular Culture Section Info: Topic Section R: Theories of Popular Culture This newly designed honors seminar will offer a comparative critical overview of significant theories about the workings of popular culture, particularly of popular media, with a focus in the seminar primarily on films, television/internet series, music videos, and the Youtube phenomenon. Through extensive reading, writing, and discussion, we’ll explore long-standing perspectives and recurrent points of contention in popular cultural discourses, such as popular media’s effects on audience/consumers; possible social impact in the public sphere and in domestic spaces; patterns and influence of intertextual references; interplay between fictional and non-fictional representations; and on-going (if somewhat masked) debates about “high” versus “low” cultural traditions (which often embed issues of class, gender, and/or race/ethnicity in questions of “taste” cultures). The seminar throughout will consider how cogently to theorize, research, and analyze the functions of popular culture across its myriad forms and contexts, also historically, and to effectively assess what counts as sufficient evidence to support a given theory. After some weeks of shared readings and engagement, which will involve student class presentations and short critical writing, each student will choose a specific popular media text or form on which to conduct an individual research/writing project of ca. 10 pages in the latter part of the semester. Expectations include alert attendance at every session, with each student always thoroughly prepared (self-annotated assigned texts at hand in class) to discuss the day’s readings and occasionally assigned out-of-class popular cultural viewings or observations. A few readings will appear as downloadable pdfs through the UIUC library system, but every student should buy/rent/arrange direct personal access to the two required books, Dominic Strinati’s Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture (Routledge, 2nd ed., 2004) and John Storey (editor and introductions), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader* (Pearson, 4th ed., 2009). (*The second named is a substantial compilation of key original essays written over the past century about popular culture, not John Storey’s textbook with a similar title, but distinguished by the term “Introduction” in place of “Reader.”)