ENGL 300

Fall 2018 Part of Term 1

Part of Term 1
Aug 27-Dec 12

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 fall 2018
CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
33990	Lecture-Discussion	B	4:00PM -5:15PM	MW	English Building	Hunt, I	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/27/18-12/12/18 Degree Notes: Advanced Composition course. Section Title: Love and Sound Section Info: Writing about Literature: Love and Sound in the Age of Consumption The class will explore the limits of love and literary sound in post-1945 American literature. While you practice close reading as closely listening to the sounds of rhetorical play, you will probe depictions of various kinds of love in works by William Faulkner, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Cynthia Ozick, David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, Leo Bersani, Elton Glaser, Audre Lorde, Claudia Rankine, and others. These works will not only model the rhetorical strategies you will use for your own writing, from anadiplosis to anaphora, but they will also help you answer the following questions about the interface between love and politics in a consumerist era. How has the economic shift from a producer to a consumer society over the course of the twentieth century shaped popular definitions of romantic love? Is romantic love necessarily a love between subjects or can it flow from objects as well? Is there an object love? How have love and terror been combined in acts of racial, gender, and economic violence, from cultural theft to mass imprisonment? How, ironically, has love engendered violence? How have civil laws shaped and undermined expressions of love among lovers, relatives, and relative strangers? What, finally, is the relationship between love and mourning, love and death, when images of the dead are mass-produced? You will explore one or all of these questions (the choice will be yours) as you practice writing about literature across a range of genres: the narrative essay, the long and short-form review for a lay public, the personal essay, and the formal scholarly study. You will come to see that the sound of your words, sentences, paragraphs—sounds you will be able to name with seismographic precision—are not accessories to your essays, not flourishes and flights, once you clarify your arguments and pronounce their stakes. The sounds, rather, will lead you to what your arguments are and what makes them, well, sound. By learning the techniques of literary sound—antimeria, antithesis, prolepsis, hyperbole, catachresis, pleonasm, pleonasm! and so much more—you will come to know and practice what you’ve loved all along. Writing about literature will fundamentally become writing about love.
33989	Lecture-Discussion	C	9:30AM -10:45AM	TR	English Building	Bauer, D	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/27/18-12/12/18 Degree Notes: Advanced Composition course. Section Title: U.S. WOMEN MODERNISTS Section Info: U.S. WOMEN MODERNISTS This writing-intensive course will be focused on three major movements in 20th-century US women's writing: high modernism, middle-class modernism, and working-class writing. We will also attend to the new modernisms, including immigrant, ethnic, Harlem Renaissance, vernacular and pulp fictions. Our class will analyze the issues of sexual expression, women’s emancipation, social reform, female sentimentality and domesticity, and new styles of femininity and feminism, along with the change from realism and naturalism to the many kinds of modernisms that women writers created. Our readings will include fiction by Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, Edna Ferber, Edith Wharton, Fannie Hurst, Anita Loos, Anzia Yezierska, Dorothy Parker, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston.
33987	Lecture-Discussion Lecture-Discussion	M M	3:00PM -4:15PM 3:00PM -4:15PM	W M	English Building English Building	Curry, R Curry, R	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/27/18-12/12/18 Degree Notes: Advanced Composition course. Section Title: Screen Adaptations Section Info: Screen Adaptations:Transforming the Written Word into Film This topic under the English 300 rubric focuses on strategies that writers and filmmakers have used to adapt fiction, plays and “real life stories” to the screen. We will focus primarily on films originally made in the U.S. and Britian for “the big (silver) screen”—(however later distributed!), that is, mostly feature length narrative films released to cinemas. But we will also consider the “made for TV” movie, which often mines newspaper headlines and celebrity stories as its core material and also a few international films (e.g., Japanese, Chinese, Italian), translating tales and styles across languages and cultural forms. The course will begin by exploring key issues in word-to-screen transformations, with students reading sections of “how to adapt” screenwriting texts. Successive units will focus on source-specific popular cinematic adaptations from theater, including Shakespeare plays; on “heritage style” films based on 18th- 20th century British and American novels (e.g., Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald); and on docudramas (films “based on a true story”) and “biopics” (fictionalized biographies of famous or infamous people). Throughout the course we will also consider issues of screen-to-screen remakes and occasionally screen-to-word reworkings, e.g., novelizations. Writing assignments will encourage students to develop their skills in researching and writing about theories and practices of screen adaptations critically, comparatively, and creatively (one assignment will ask students to draft a mini-screenplay adapting source material). Course reading will include one book on adaptation as a particular practice of screenwriting, possibly a second text, and in any case a printed packet of relevant and engaging critical articles. [The professor will email students enrolled as of August 10 to announce the specific assigned book title(s); information will not be available before then).] Besides offering opportunities (and the required credit!) for advanced composition, the course aims to help students develop their understanding of the production and critical reception of adaptations, cultural forms which are often recast trans-nationally and historically (and sometimes across genres) to very diverse effects from the so-called “original.” Alongside considering adaptations across media forms, the course will address issues of gender, race/ethnicity, and class, all in relation to both the “adapting” media institutions and to the representations that emerge. We will thus address the question of whose literary works or biographies get adapted, by whom, in what ways, and for which anticipated audiences. Please note: although we will watch a number of film excerpts in class, students will need to watch in full several assigned films outside class time (available as DVDs on reserve in the undergraduate library media center or likely available through streaming services, according to student preference.)
39501	Lecture-Discussion	P	12:30PM -1:45PM	TR	Foreign Languages Building	Gaedtke, A	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/27/18-12/12/18 Degree Notes: Advanced Composition course. Section Title: Literature of War Section Info: Literature of War: Disability, Gender, and Modernism Modern British culture was forever transformed by The Great War. Thousands of soldiers returned from the front physically and emotional disabled, resulting in new conceptions of the body, mind, and masculinity. Efforts to explain and treat these soldiers included new theories of psychic life, and modern literature was altered by its fascination with these new theories. The war effort also enlisted the labor of women in ways that transformed gender roles, and these changes would become sources of excitement and uncertainty for many works of modern fiction and poetry. This course will examine the fascinating forms of literary experimentation that emerged in order to represent and manage the experiences of anxiety, trauma, and loss of World War I. The turn toward stream of consciousness narration during this time can be understood as an attempt to render these lived experiences. As a result of the war, poetry would never look or sound the same. We will combine our readings in modernist literature with work in trauma studies, disability studies, and medical humanities, and we will conclude the semester by reading a more recent novel written about the lived experiences of The Great War in the style of modernist fiction. While reconstructing the traumatic era of modernism, we will ask reflexive questions about the limits of remembering in literature and history. Readings will likely include works by Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, T.S. Eliot, Mina Loy, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Wyndham Lewis, Sigmund Freud, W. H. Rivers, and Pat Barker.