ENGL 396

Fall 2019 All Classes

All Classes

English Honors Seminar

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Credit: 3 hours.

An open-topic, discussion-oriented seminar aimed at majors who have shown high skill and intensive interest in the area of English studies.

May be repeated up to 6 hours in the same term to a maximum of 12 hours. Prerequisite: A 3.33 grade point average or consent of the English Department's Director of Undergraduate Studies. Restricted to English majors.

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ENGL 396 class schedule data for fall 2019
CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
32223	Lecture-Discussion	E	1:00PM -3:30PM	W	313 Gregory Hall	Jenkins, C	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/26/19-12/11/19 Special Approval: Departmental Approval Required Section Title: Theorizing Hip Hop Section Info: Theorizing Hip Hop: Hip Hop (as) Narrative Description: In this class we will apply the tools of literary theory and criticism to hip hop artistry. We will think about rap music not only as a poetic or lyric form, but as a narrative one: a medium of storytelling. While we will explicate individual performances and recordings, our larger goal will be to theorize hip hop as national discourse and contemporary cultural artifact. To that end, our study will include a great deal of recent scholarship on hip hop, particularly new analyses of hip hop aesthetics that expand upon earlier, purely historical treatments. In our work with both primary and secondary texts, we will consider the kinds of stories that rap music tells, including those that it tells about the nature of hip hop itself (hip hop meta-narratives). We will also explore the ways that hip hop culture is deployed in the telling of other types of stories, and in other media (the novel, television and film, visual art). Focusing primarily on work produced in the last fifteen to twenty years, the course will be organized thematically, addressing key topics that recur in the music and in the culture more broadly. Our primary objective will be to gain a more nuanced understanding of rap music’s aesthetic and cultural significance, through critical analysis of hip hop as performance and as social metaphor.
70614	Lecture-Discussion	JB	2:00PM -4:30PM	R	125 English Building	Perry, C	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/26/19-12/11/19 Special Approval: Departmental Approval Required Section Title: Shakespeare & Early Mod Stagin Section Info: Shakespeare and the Early Modern Staging of Race - Because of Shakespeare’s longstanding centrality to Anglo-American ideas about literature, well-known plays such as Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and The Tempest have long been mainstream cultural touchstones associated with ideas about universal humanity and/or racial and ethnic alterity. If you prick me, do I not bleed? And Shakespeare lived in a cosmopolitan London at a time of anxious globalization, race-based slavery, and European colonial aspirations. But until surprisingly recently, race was not a major field of sustained scholarly inquiry within Shakespeare studies. There are many reasons for this, but one impediment was a nagging sense that the term race might be anachronistic, since scholars have tended to treat the invention of modern racialized categories as a product of the Enlightenment. But (the counterargument now goes) racialization has always been a fluid operation taking place in different kinds of overlapping discourses simultaneously, and to treat post-enlightenment racism as categorically different from stigmatized constructions of alterity in the pre-Enlightenment world is to disallow examination of certain kinds of continuity that obviously matter too. This class will examine such questions via careful examination of a number of plays, mostly by Shakespeare, supplemented by other relevant early modern documents and selected recent criticism.
40420	Lecture-Discussion	Z1	1:00PM -3:30PM	M	135 English Building	Wood, G	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/26/19-12/11/19 Special Approval: Departmental Approval Required Section Title: Green Romanticism Section Info: The extraordinary literary outpouring of the Romantic period (1780-1830) co-incided with the beginnings of our modern industrialized system—an economic and infrastructural “new world” of fossil fuels, global trade, urbanization, and rapid growth. Writers such as Wordsworth, the Shelleys, Austen, and Byron also witnessed the emergence of the modern climate and earth sciences, which introduced controversial concepts of environmental change and deep time. The reactions of Romantic writers to this scientific revolution, and to the changing economic world system around 1800, were complex and ambivalent: they embraced elements of our carbon-based modernity, while at the same time eulogizing a lost connection with organic processes and the pre-industrial past. This course re-examines a wide range of Romantic-era authors often mistaken for idealistic celebrants of nature, with a view to understanding their crucial role in the creation of modern ecological discourse, and as eloquent first witnesses to the accelerated human re-engineering of the planet scientists now designate the Anthropocene.