ENGL 350

Fall 2019 All Classes

All Classes

Writing about Literature, Text, and Culture

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Credit: 3 hours.

Writing-intensive, variable-topic course designed to improve English majors' ability to produce clear, well-organized, analytically sound and persuasively argued essays relevant to English studies. Introduces students to research techniques through the examination of critical texts appropriate to the course topic.

Credit is not given for ENGL 300 and ENGL 350. Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement; one year of college literature or consent of instructor. For majors only.

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

Advanced Composition

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ENGL 350 class schedule data for fall 2019
CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
71517	Lecture-Discussion	D	11:00AM -11:50AM	MWF	127 English Building	Hansen, J	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/26/19-12/11/19 Degree Notes: Advanced Composition course. Credit: 3 hours Section Info: Why Do we Love Horror? When the novel came into being in the in middle of the eighteenth century, its most popular genre was the Gothic—the novel of horror. In fact, the modern era—the era of science, reason, and democracy—has been obsessed with terror, fear, and the unknown since its very inception. Do our notions of literary or filmic horror have anything to do with the politics of terror? If you’ve ever asked “why do I like to be scared?,” then this is the class for you. Beginning with some of the earliest novels of Gothic horror, the course will trace out a literary, political, and philosophical history. Each unit of the course will explore how a different political/cultural concept of terror plays out in literary and filmic texts. Philosophical texts will include excerpts from Thomas Hobbes, Edmund Burke, Sigmund Freud, and Julia Kristeva. Required Novels: Lewis, Matthew. The Monk (1794) Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein (1818) James, Henry The Turn of the Screw (1898) Lovecraft, H.P. Call of Cthulhu (1928) Jackson, Shirley. The Haunting of Hill House (1959) Tremblay, Paul. A Head full of Ghosts (2015) Films: Todd Browning’s Freaks (1932), Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968), William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973), and Thomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One in (2008).
71520	Lecture-Discussion	Q	12:30PM -1:45PM	TR	115 English Building	Newcomb, J	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/26/19-12/11/19 Degree Notes: Advanced Composition course. Credit: 3 hours Section Title: Mod Lit and The Machine Age Section Info: What makes the “modern world” modern? One answer to that question is the machine technologies that between 1865 and 1950 reshaped American life in more ways than we can count. They reshaped the arts as well: William Carlos Williams once remarked that “a poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.” This course will ask how American writers and artists of the modern period arrived at such an apparently outrageous assertion, and how they struggled to comprehend and articulate the changes that these technologies were bringing. In this class we’ll examine the era called “the Machine Age” as a phenomenon that transformed people’s understanding of fundamental categories of experience including space, time, speed, gender, race, class, and even human consciousness itself. In doing so we’ll make connections between poetry, fiction, painting, photography, film, product design, advertising, architecture, urban planning, and music. Flashing along on the American railways and subways with early riders from Walt Whitman to Sara Teasdale, we’ll sense the wonder and terror that they felt and tried to express in their arts. We’ll feel the ferocity and absurdity of the modern factory floor, as it was captured by poets (John Beecher), filmmakers (Charlie Chaplin), and photographers (Lewis Hine). We’ll see how modernists like Ernest Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore, as well as a host of painters and photographers, drew upon the power of steam-rollers and skyscrapers to create artistic forms that would work for the 20th century. With Kate Chopin we’ll think about how labor-saving technologies were revolutionizing people’s attitudes toward time and material possessions, and making shopping a way of life. And we’ll examine how Americans of 1939, poised between depression and world war but still nursing high hopes for the future, imagined “The World of Tomorrow” in the New York World’s Fair. Before we’re through we’ll come to appreciate how intense responses to emerging machine technologies, the new styles these technologies inspired, and the unpredictable social and political changes they helped bring about, defined modern life.
71519	Lecture-Discussion	S	2:00PM -3:15PM	TR	127 English Building	Hudek, B	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/26/19-12/11/19 Degree Notes: Advanced Composition course. Credit: 3 hours Section Title: 21stCentury African-Amer Lit Section Info: 21st-century African-American Literature: Life as a “Problem”. If “being a problem is a strange experience” as W. E. B. DuBois writes in The Souls of Black Folk, how do contemporary black writers navigate life as a problem? How does their writing work against these notions, and how has being a problem changed, been challenged, and persisted from the time of DuBois’ 1903 treatise to our current moment? This multi-genre class would challenge students to think about how whiteness, blackness, and diversity are defined, navigated, integrated, and/or segregated in 21st century U.S. culture. Readings include Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Heavy, by Kiese Laymon, The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, Salvage the Bones, by Jesmyn Ward, The Hate U Give, by Angie Thomas, and other shorter readings to be provided.
71515	Lecture-Discussion	X	11:00AM -11:50AM	MWF	443 Altgeld Hall	Littlefield, M	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/26/19-12/11/19 Degree Notes: Advanced Composition course. Credit: 3 hours Section Title: After the Apocalypse! Section Info: What happens once the apocalypse is over? Sure, in your average post-apocalyptic narrative, cities are burned, populations are infected, food supplies are disrupted . . . but so much remains! This course will begin at the end, with texts such as: The Road, Oryx and Crake, The Sheep Look Up, The Country of Last Things, The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047, Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, and plenty of multi-media, and interdisciplinary non-fiction. We’ll ask why are we so obsessed with the end of the world; but we'll also ask why and how we choose to rebuild. Our course fulfills the Advanced Composition requirement, so there will be plenty of writing . . . but the topics and format will be largely up to you--take the traditional paper route, or opt into so many other styles and formats!