ENGL 396

Fall 2021 Part of Term 1

Part of Term 1
Aug 23-Dec 8

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 2021
CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
32223	Lecture-Discussion	E	2:00PM -3:15PM	TR	English Building	Courtemanche, E	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/23/21-12/08/21 Special Approval: Departmental Approval Required Section Title: Victorian Utopias Section Info: Victorian Utopias and Environmental Thought -The nineteenth century was a great age of speculative utopian thought in Britain, fueled by the shock of the French Revolution and the social transformations and great wealth created by the industrialism. But writers at the time were also conscious that human industry threatened natural beauty, and were eager to imagine new societies in harmony with natural laws. Today, as the specter of climate change forces us to rethink the relation between human society and the environment, we can learn from these earlier utopian visions and conflicts. In this class we will set the stage for utopian thinking by reading first about the industrial crisis that transformed the realist novel, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto and Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South. Then we will read American and British utopias and dystopias that projected socialist, feminist, and anarchist alternatives: Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, Richard Jeffries’s After London, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887, William Morris’s News from Nowhere, H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland. Our secondary readings on Victorian environments will range from Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City to Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton, Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital, and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson’s and Vicky Albritton’s Green Victorians, ending with Ernest Callenbach’s 1970s classic Ecotopia. Students will be asked to contribute weekly discussion responses, write one 6-page close reading paper and one 10-page research paper, and deliver one class presentation.
40420	Lecture-Discussion	E1	12:30PM -1:45PM	TR	English Building	Russell, L	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/23/21-12/08/21 Special Approval: Departmental Approval Required Section Title: Dictionaries Section Info: Adventures in Dictionaries - Dictionaries are strange objects: so revered as to receive special seating on purpose-build pedestals in libraries; so trusted that we dismiss even our own words as "not words" when they're not dictionaries; so impersonal and encompassing in their accounts of language that they feel almost authorless; and so irrelevant in online environments where definitions reach us through pop-ups and search summaries from nowhere. This seminar explores the genre of the dictionary--what it is, where it came from, why it matters. In addition to researching the history of major mainstream dictionaries, we'll explore strange and subversive dictionaries--visual dictionaries, slang dictionaries, sex dictionaries, and more. We'll investigate how dictionaries are made and revised, and ask which practices align with present political urgencies to do with identity and identification. Finally we'll consider how dictionaries are received and reinvented by readers, users, poets, artists, legal experts, cultural critics, and more.
32226	Lecture-Discussion	S	1:00PM -1:50PM	MWF	English Building	Oh, R	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/23/21-12/08/21 Special Approval: Departmental Approval Required Section Title: Environmentalism Nonhuman Section Info: ENGL 396 The Anthropocene: Nonhuman Agency in the Age of Man - The Anthropocene has been called the Age of Man. Popularized in 2001, the Anthropocene names a new geological epoch in which the collective effects of the human species as whole have changed the climate processes of the entire planet. But the Anthropocene is equally the age of the nonhuman – of powerful nonhuman forces that have been triggered by humans and are now far beyond human control or prediction. It is the age of animals and plants, limited resources like water and clean air, hazards like viruses and extreme weather. Despite its name, the Age of Man is in no way the age of humans alone. This class will introduce you to the idea of the Anthropocene and we will use this seemingly human-centric term to explore the place of nonhumans in the world. Whether from the recent pandemic, erratic weather, or the dwindling of bees, the nonhuman forces around us impinge on us more and more, in ways both ordinary and strange, locally, globally, and unequally. Where and how can we see the agency or effectivity of nonhumans at work? How does attunement to nonhuman agency change our sense of human-centric concepts like politics, responsibility, vulnerability, kinship/community, and cause and effect? In what ways do nonhumans act as independent agents, in their own right? But more importantly, in what ways are nonhumans bound up with human social structures and inequities, both current and historical? We will read from a variety of sources including literary criticism, posthuman theory, sociology, history, journalism, and science studies, and we will think with a variety of genres, predominant novels, film, and art. Texts may include Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon, Lauren Buekes’s Zoo City, Richard Power’s The Overstory, Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums, Jon Shenk’s The Island President, Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky’s Watermark, Anna L. Tsing et al’s Feral Atlas, George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social, Timothy Morton’s The Ecological Thought, Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “Four Theses of History” and Donna Haraway’s The Companion Species Manifesto.