ENGL 396

Fall 2020 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 2020
CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
32223	Online	E	1:00PM -3:30PM	W	n.a.	Mahaffey, V	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/24/20-12/09/20 Special Approval: Departmental Approval Required Section Title: Ireland and Sexuality Section Info: Ireland and Sexuality - As a country dominated for 800 years by England (politically) and the Catholic Church (spiritually), Ireland developed a split between pious obedience and revolutionary resistance that helped to shape the literature of the early twentieth century. This split was reflected not only in political opinions; it also affected attitudes towards sexuality, especially extramarital, same-sex and female sexuality. We will begin by analyzing an example of sexual repressiveness that had serious political repercussions: the case of Charles Stewart Parnell, a member of the British Parliament who was working within the legal system to establish Home Rule for Ireland but was removed from office for having an extramarital affair with a married woman (whom he later married). The relevant texts will include Joyce, “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” and the first chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and selected poems by W. B. Yeats. Next, we will examine the trials of Oscar Wilde for “gross indecency,” in which it was sometimes clear whether Wilde himself was on trial or whether it was his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. The laws against homosexuality are relevant here, as is the work of sexologists on homosexuality. Moreover, Wilde’s Irishness played an important role in his decision to stand trial rather than to escape to France, as most of his contemporaries did when they were on the verge of prosecution. We will read The Picture of Dorian Gray and selected excerpts from the trials. We will also read Joyce’s story “The Encounter.” Control of women’s sexuality was established partly through institutions designed to punish women for sexual misconduct (or simply disobedience). The system we will look at more closely are the Magdalene laundries, where women were sent to get “clean” by doing laundry. We will read selections from James Smith’s book on the laundries, Joyce’s story “Clay,” and see the film, The Magdalene Sisters. We will also look at the issue from a different angle: one that investigates the consequences of infertility for couples in Catholic culture. Here, the main texts will be J.M. Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen and a selection from Angela Bourke’s The Burning of Bridget Cleary. Finally, we will examine the question of censorship, especially as it pertains to sexual explicitness. Joyce’s Ulysses was banned for obscenity, but was it obscene or simply insistent upon openness about the body and about the wide variety of sexual desires and practices? We will conclude with Ulysses.
40420	Online	E1	1:00PM -2:15PM	MW	n.a.	Newcomb, L	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/24/20-12/09/20 Special Approval: Departmental Approval Required Section Title: Print Culture Section Info: Print Culture in Early Modern Britain - Print Culture in Britain, 1550-1660 L. Newcomb How did the rise of printed books transform the inventive writing of early modern Britain? This seminar traces certain genres we now treasure as literature – lyric poetry, stage drama, early fiction, song – as they emerge from oral and manuscript practice and (sometimes) take new shapes in print. The lens of print culture allows us to ask how those material changes affected readers’ experiences, and now inform our contemporary responses. Using the rich holdings of our Rare Book and Manuscript Library, we’ll look for evidence of publishing strategies and actual readership. We’ll also look hard at our anthologies and new digital tools as further meaning-making transformations -- and as opportunities for our own inventive writing. Questions to consider: What is the difference between a literary ‘work’ and a book? Are early modern printed books mass-produced or unique objects, and why does that matter? What is the difference between the survival of an original text and the valuing of the work? How do we build future uses for literary texts? Hands-on work, several short critical papers, and a creative final project. Textbooks: • Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Vol. 2 The Renaissance & Early Seventeenth Century, 3rd ed. (2016), co-bound with King Lear. • Michelle Levy and Tom Mole, Broadview Introduction to Book History (2017) • Sarah Werner, Studying Early Printed Books, 1450-1800 (Wiley-Blackwell 2019)
70614	Lecture-Discussion Lecture-Discussion	TN TN	3:00PM -5:30PM 3:00PM -4:50PM	R T	370 Armory 370 Armory	Newcomb, J Newcomb, J	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/24/20-12/09/20 Special Approval: Departmental Approval Required Section Title: 20th Century Blocks Section Info: Twentieth-Century Blocks: American Cinema and the Modern Cityscape - The skylines of the early 20th-century city engendered new ways of experiencing height, size, speed, noise, density, and social difference. The same could be said of the emerging entertainment form of cinema. Drawing upon film, art history, architecture, and urban planning, this seminar traces the closely intertwined history of American cinema and the modern cityscape. We’ll see how the vertically expanding city both beguiled American filmmakers, artists, and writers to imagine a modernity without boundaries, and challenged their capacity to address vast new measures of time and distance. We’ll begin by examining visually spectacular cityscape films of the late silent era, such as Harold Lloyd’s Speedy and King Vidor’s The Crowd. These films mount potent critiques of machine-age mass society while still preserving a strong sense of the modern city as a material and symbolic site of possibility, renewal, and progress. Then we’ll trace influential portrayals of the cinematic cityscape between 1945 and 1980, including hard-boiled film noir (The Naked City) and 1950s movies involving women emerging into the city skyline (Rear Window, Breakfast at Tiffany’s). We’ll end by examining three important Hollywood genres of the 1970s through the 1990s: 1.) Dystopian dramas of the contemporary city (The French Connection), filmed in gritty urban locations, that use the unstable visual and social textures of the “inner city” to grapple with the complex racial and class dynamics underlying the rhetoric of “urban decline” and “white flight.” 2). Period films of epic scope that employ crime film conventions and meticulous production design to recreate nostalgically “lost” modern cities at an ambiguous historical moment in which the vertical metropolis was giving way to horizontal postmodern sprawl. 3). Films grappling with the results of mass suburbanization and center-city decline (Back to the Future Part II). This class features a two-hour required weekly screening session. There will be informal responses to readings and films, a class presentation, a short essay based on close reading, and a longer research paper.