ENGL 350

Fall 2020 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 2020
CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
71515	Online	D	11:00AM -11:50AM	MWF	n.a.	Baron, I	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/24/20-12/09/20 Degree Notes: Advanced Composition course. Credit: 3 hours Section Title: #MeToo: American & British Section Info: #MeToo: American and British Seduction Fiction Since October of 2017 when the first allegations of sexual misconduct against the film mogul Harvey Weinstein began to surface, the idealization of the rugged but moral heteronormative American male was undermined by the #MeToo movement. Women begun to speak out, extricating themselves from their submissive roles as social others in American culture. Suddenly, actors who were seemingly formidable icons of postmodernist feminism like Rose McGowan were openly identifying themselves as oppressed victims of sexual assault. Although the #MeToo Movement was initiated by women, gay actors who had also been rendered silent began to report acts of sexual misconduct, adding to the collective voices of the oppressed. Social media was barraged by the confessions of these actors, who refused to be silenced and instead united to dismantle the patriarchy. In this course, we’ll examine the rise of the #MeToo Movement through a study of the Anglo-American seduction novel and how this moralistic story based on the fall of Eve impacted audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. We’ll focus on the image of the male seducer and how sexually active males are viewed by the cultural milieu vs. their female counterparts. We’ll delve into the character of the male rake and discuss the relevance of the male gaze and the male sexual imperative in America and Britain. The intricate relationship between the fallen woman and her child is also a recurring trope in most of the seduction novels that we will read. And we’ll examine how the trope of the fallen woman also became adopted as an undercurrent LGBTQ narrative within mainstream and noncanonical fiction. Ultimately we’ll see whether class differences, identity politics or the enfranchisement of women, liberated females from sexual stigmatization or whether women are still marginalized by expressing sexual agency and outing men for sexual assault. Requirements include: a class presentation and three papers. Texts and films may include: Charlotte Temple, Sense and Sensibility, Pleasantville, The Scarlet Letter, The Ginger Tree, The Awakening, Passing, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, The Handmaid’s Tale, Thelma and Louise, Juno and Easy A.
71517	Online	M	9:30AM -10:50AM	TR	n.a.	Hansen, J	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/24/20-12/09/20 Degree Notes: Advanced Composition course. Credit: 3 hours Section Title: Detective Fiction Section Info: Detective Fiction - Detective Fiction: As the twentieth century dawned and Britain’s empire foundered, some of the nation’s most dynamic and inventive writers began to pen detective-based mystery stories. While Arthur Conan-Doyle is often credited with originating the genre, both Wilkie Collins and Edgar Allen Poe wrote the type of detective stories that inspired the creation of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Tracing a literary history that begins with Collins’s The Moonstone and several of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, this course will chart the ways that the collapse of empire and the two World Wars prepared the way for the hyper-alert genius detectives that we see in the writings of Agatha Christie (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd). We’ll also check out how American writers like Patricia Highsmith (Strangers on a Train), Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep), and Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon) responded by developing the notorious, morally compromised detectives that we find in so much hard-boiled fiction. We’ll finish out the course by returning to the English writer Mark Haddon and his intriguing 2003 mystery, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. We’ll also watch several films:e.g., Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, David Fincher’s Se7en, Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. Requirements for the class will include three 5- page essays (which will go through multiple drafts), one exam, a weekly reading journal, one book review, one movie review, and active class participation.
71520	Online	Q	12:30PM -1:50PM	TR	n.a.	Somerville, S	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/24/20-12/09/20 Degree Notes: Advanced Composition course. Credit: 3 hours Section Title: James Baldwin Section Info: James Baldwin - Harlem, Paris, Istanbul. Novelist, essayist, playwright, poet. Preacher, civil rights activist, expatriate writer. Defying any single classification, genre, or location, James Baldwin (1924-1987) and his writing continue to complicate the ways we think about twentieth-century American literature, especially the overlapping histories of African American literature and lesbian/gay literature. This course will offer an opportunity to study Baldwin’s writing in depth, including works such as Notes of a Native Son, Giovanni’s Room, Another Country, The Fire Next Time, Going to Meet the Man, and Go Tell It On the Mountain. We will also view the film documentary I am Not Your Negro (dir. Raoul Peck, 2016). At the same time, we will consider the literary, cultural, and political contexts of Baldwin’s writing, including the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, the early lesbian and gay liberation movement, and the Black Power movement. Along the way, we will read selected critical and theoretical scholarship that sheds light on the politics of race, sexuality, and representation in Baldwin’s work.
71519	Online	X	12:30PM -1:45PM	MW	n.a.	Mortensen, P	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/24/20-12/09/20 Degree Notes: Advanced Composition course. Credit: 3 hours Section Title: Writing On Buildings Section Info: Writing on Buildings - Sorry to disappoint: We won’t literally write on buildings in this course. But we will delve into the design processes, material technologies, professional standards, government regulations, political machinations, grand obsessions, good intentions, petty squabbles, and bad habits that shape the writing we find all around us in the built environment. As we investigate this writing, we’ll discover that there’s a lot to say about the conventions that dictate what can (and can’t and shouldn’t) be written permanently on and inside buildings. We’ll endeavor to learn how these conventions came to be, and we’ll argue about their continued relevance in this era of digital identification and wayfinding. We’ll consider, too, how writing on buildings can fall short of equitably serving a diverse public, and we’ll imagine and propose remedies to right what seems wrong. Additionally, we’ll examine writing on buildings that is, from an institutional perspective, transgressive: graffiti, stenciling, projections, and the like. Our writing projects will document, critique, appreciate, and argue, and in so doing will draw on multimodal strategies of expression. For most writing projects, the university and surrounding communities will be our laboratory. In this lab we’ll do some observational fieldwork, as well as some archival research. Thematically related prose fiction and nonfiction will help us think critically about our research and writing endeavors. At times we’ll tap into the expertise of professional designers and planners: architects, landscape architects, urban planners, and graphic designers. Explorations further afield—in Chicago, for example—may be arranged, but won’t be required. Restriction(s): Restricted to English major(s) or minor(s).