ENGL 350

Fall 2021 Part of Term 1

Part of Term 1
Aug 23-Dec 8

Writing about Literature, Text, and Culture

SHOW FINAL EXAM SCHEDULE

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

My Favorites

My Schedule

Section Status updates every 10 minutes.

ENGL 350 class schedule data for fall 2021
CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
71515	Online	D	2:00PM -2:50PM	MWF	n.a.	Baron, I	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/23/21-12/08/21 Degree Notes: Advanced Composition course. Credit: 3 hours Section Title: Writing Lit, Text & Culture Section Info: *ENGL 350 - Iryce Baron - Brexit and National Memory in Contemporary Britain - In The Goblet of Fire, Dumbledore introduces Harry Potter to the Pensieve, a magical font which serves as the repository of memories that can be easily stored, retrieved and re-examined at will. But as Harry quickly learns, memory is not a fixed entity that paves the way to a clear understanding of the past. Instead, memory can be elusive, it can be multiplistic and it can be tweaked or completely altered. What attributes then constitute a unified national memory and how is it informed by social class, by race and by gender? How do writers transpose memory into fiction and how reliable are these works? In this course, we’ll examine the rise of contemporary fiction in Britain as a lens through which social progress and diversity can either be seen as a flourishing or flagging political standard. We’ll determine whether British citizens have prospered from modern Socialist policies which are theoretically racially and culturally inclusive, or if welfare reform forced Britain to lose its edge in the world market, which it is now trying to recapture by a renewal of political platforms based on educational elitism, neoconservatism, capitalist enterprise and white nationalist constructs of racial purity. Our thematic anchor will be the importance of individual and collective memory to define social progress or to incite class and racial war. Through the medium of memory, we’ll focus our attentions on the history of class and identity politics in Britain over the last three decades. We’ll explore whether the future lies with traditional parties such as the Tories, Labour and the Liberal Democrats, or with Alt-Right groups such as the British National Party, English Defence League, UKIP and the new Reclaim Party. We’ll ponder what it means to be British in the 21st century and how the Brexit conflict has reframed the national identity of Britons out of fragmented white Anglocentric literary and political memories. And finally we’ll consider whether Britain has become an enlightened utopia where social mobility and racial equality is universal or whether it’s transforming into a dark dystopian zone, in which only those powered by money, status and ancient family ties have any rights. Students are expected to attend class regularly and to actively participate in class discussions. In addition, students will be required to give oral reports and to write four papers. Novels may include: Never Let Me Go, Atonement, The Remains of the Day, Small Island, Arthur and George, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and The Golden Compass. TV Series and films may include: The Crown, A Discovery of Witches and The Crimes of Grindelwald. Restriction(s): Restricted to English or Creative Writing major(s) or minor(s).
71517	Lecture-Discussion	M	9:30AM -10:50AM	TR	English Building	Newcomb, J	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/23/21-12/08/21 Degree Notes: Advanced Composition course. Credit: 3 hours Section Title: Writing Lit, Text & Culture Section Info: Modern Literature and the Machine Age - What makes the “modern world” modern? One answer to that question is the machine technologies that between 1865 and 1945 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 Machine Age” as an era that transformed fundamental categories of human experience such as space, time, speed, distance, gender, race, class, and 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 think about how “labor-saving technologies” were revolutionizing people’s attitudes toward leisure time and material possessions, and making shopping a way of life. We’ll feel the ferocity and absurdity of the modern factory floor, as it was captured by poets, photographers, and filmmakers. We’ll see how modernists like Ernest Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, and Langston Hughes, as well as a host of visual artists, drew upon the power of steamrollers, skyscrapers, and aircraft to create artistic forms that could make sense of the 20th century. Before we’re through we’ll come to appreciate how their passionate artistic 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. Restriction(s): Restricted to English or Creative Writing major(s) or minor(s).
71520	Lecture-Discussion	Q	12:30PM -1:50PM	TR	Speech & Hearing Science Bldg	Freeburg, C	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/23/21-12/08/21 Degree Notes: Advanced Composition course. Credit: 3 hours Section Title: Writing Lit, Text & Culture Section Info: This course investigates black culture and performance from the Slavery to just after the war in Vietnam. We will begin with by looking at how the remnants of West African music, folklore, and religion shape black art forms like the spirituals, blues, jazz, and the urban black pulpit. Through the course we will analyze how various writings from the ethnographic journal of Thomas Higginson to the paintings of Henry Tanner to the novels of Zora Neale Hurston reveal how institutions shape black life and likewise how black artists see themselves as challenging oppressive institutional constraints. The robust history of black culture is also crucial to most notions of black politics. The final course emphasis will draw on recent debates by literary critics and cultural theorists over the political uses of black culture. Restriction(s): Restricted to English or Creative Writing major(s) or minor(s).
71519	Lecture-Discussion	X	12:00PM -12:50PM	MWF	Lincoln Hall	Hansen, J	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/23/21-12/08/21 Degree Notes: Advanced Composition course. Credit: 3 hours Section Info: English 350 - The Art of Revenge: The Aesthetic Pleasures of Anger and Retribution - Both popular-culture and so-called high art agree on at least one thing: vengeance sells. Tales of revenge provide us with some of our most fascinating, compulsively watchable, and endlessly reimagined stories. Simply put, our culture loves revenge. For some reason, we adore watching an injustice occur and then seeing an intricate, carefully constructed, and shockingly violent plan for retribution unfold as a result. We don’t always ask why we like the things that we like, though. We often avoid delving into such questions because they reveal to us that our pleasures often seem uncivilized and unethical. This course will be dedicated to exploring precisely the reasons that lie behind our enjoyment of those tales of violent revenge. In a sense, every great revenge saga revolves around an avenger who seeks to restore justice in a way that not only reestablishes order, but that also produces a sense of social, ethical, and visual symmetry. Hence, every great avenger, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet to Tarantino’s Beatrix Kiddo becomes an artist, a character who seeks to bring order to chaos, a masterful planner who thrives on balance and proportion. As the artist orchestrates a grand design for revenge, we take pleasure in witnessing the aestheticized carnage. Starting with texts from the Ancient world such as Aeschylus’s Orestia, Seneca’s Thyestes, and Aristotle’s Poetics to modern philosophical reflections by Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Martha Nussbaum, we will trace out a history of the Revenge Tragedy. Other texts for the class will include William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri, Christopher Nolan’s Memento, Chan-Wook Park’s Old Boy and The Handmaiden, Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, The Coen Brother’s version of True Grit, and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds and Kill Bill. Course requirements will include three 5-page essays, one 4-page film review, weekly contributions to a course Wiki, weekly contributions to the course's online discussion forum, active class participation, and a final exam. This class comes with a trigger warning. Many of the readings and other content in this course will include topics that some might find offensive and/or traumatizing. Revenge tragedies sometimes involve intense, over-the-top, graphic depictions of sexual violence. I’ll always aim to warn students about potentially disturbing content, and I ask all students to help to create an atmosphere of mutual respect and sensitivity. If you need more specific warnings or have questions about a specific text, feel free to discuss it with me. Restriction(s): Restricted to English major(s) or minor(s).