ENGL 396

Spring 2019 All Classes

All Classes

Honors Seminar I

SHOW FINAL EXAM SCHEDULE

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 2019
CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
32114	Lecture-Discussion	C	1:00PM -2:50PM	R	115 English Building	Nazar, H	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/14/19-05/01/19 Special Approval: Departmental Approval Required Section Info: Topic: “Between Women: Female Communities in British Literature, Margaret Cavendish to Jane Austen” In A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694), the early feminist philosopher Mary Astell argued that women could fight centuries of gender oppression only by retreating from the world of men—at least temporarily—to “Protestant nunneries,” which they should set up all around the country. There middle-and upper-class women could escape the “tyranny” of custom and the trivial pursuits prescribed for their sex, substituting French philosophy and the Bible for the dubious pleasures of their looking-glasses and unreliable male flattery. Don’t look to men for your self-worth, Astell repeatedly urged her female readers. Look instead to yourselves and to admirable women friends, who will help you perfect both faith and judgment, and enable you to create a heaven on earth—a new Garden of Eden, where there are no men or “serpents to deceive you.” Astell’s striking comments about female solidarity find parallels throughout the long eighteenth century: in plays by women such as Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure (1668), where “Lady Happy” establishes a convent that doesn’t require taking religious vows (only a vow to enjoy oneself); in the friendship poetry of Katherine Philips (“Orinda”) and Anne Finch; in utopian novels such as Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762); and novels about marriage and female education such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman or Maria (1798), and Jane Austen’s Emma (1816) and Northanger Abbey (1818). This seminar explores a crucial episode in the cultural history of feminism by exploring how British women writers, from Cavendish to Austen, represented female friendship and the potential of separatist communities.
62424	Lecture-Discussion	F	10:00AM -10:50AM	MWF	113 English Building	Barrett, R	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/14/19-05/01/19 Special Approval: Departmental Approval Required Section Title: Nature and the Non-Human Section Info: Topic: Nature and the Non-Human in Medieval Britain and Ireland The pages of medieval British and Irish literature abound with human and non-human agents: errant knights, asexual elephants, living statues, savage werewolves, talking crucifixes, apocalyptic floods, and so on. In this course, we will explore the enmeshment of these diverse entities, paying particular attention to their deconstruction of the longstanding binary opposition between nature and culture. Our texts (which we will read in Modern English translation) include the Exeter Book riddles of Anglo-Saxon England (in which talking objects recount their histories and ask you to guess their true identities), the Arthurian romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (in which Sir Gawain finds himself the object of an all-too-deadly hunt), the Anglo-Norman Fables of Marie de France (in which Aesop’s animals undergo a chivalric transformation), and the Welsh Mabinogi (in which crafty wizards treat species difference, not as a barrier, but as a revolving door).
32113	Lecture-Discussion	N	1:00PM -2:50PM	T	115 English Building	Jones, J	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/14/19-05/01/19 Special Approval: Departmental Approval Required Section Title: Moby-Dick and the World Section Info: Moby-Dick and the World It Made We will begin this course by reading Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick. At first, the novel will be a laboratory in which we experiment with various approaches in critical thought, including critical race studies, queer theory, historical research, and the environmental humanities. From there, our investigation will spiral outward to explore a wide range of novels, poems, films, plays, artworks, games, and pop culture artifacts that take up, criticize, and play with Moby-Dick’s multifarious themes and questions. Students can expect to encounter works by Amitav Ghosh, China Mieville, Shakespeare, Sarah Orne Jewett, Allan Sekula, Matt Kish, and a wide range of others. Students will produce both critical and creative writing projects.