ENGL 396

Spring 2021 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 spring 2021
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	32113	Online	F	2:00PM -3:15PM	MW	n.a.	Loughran, T	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/25/21-05/05/21 Special Approval: Departmental Approval Required Section Title: Adventures in Posthumanism Section Info: Adventures in Posthumanism - How does a bird (or a tree or. . . a virus) think? Can a person fall in love with her computer’s operating system? Should rivers be given the legal standing of persons? What would it be like to live out your life as a mushroom? These are the kinds of questions we’ll think about in this course, as we watch films, read novels, and grapple with a lot of weird, sometimes dense, but exciting new critical theory (much of it feminist, postcolonial, queer, and Indigenous). With the onset of human-induced climate change, the humanities have in recent years taken a counterintuitive turn into what is now sometimes called the “post-human” or the “non-human.” This means we find ourselves increasingly interested in trying to demote human beings from the center of the universe (or the top of the planetary feeding chain) and to imagine instead more horizontal relations among people, animals, extraterrestrial "aliens," the environment, and artificial intelligences (like Siri, Alexa, and Cortana). With this shift, the old taxonomies and binaries of humanist scholarship (man versus beast, human versus vegetable, self versus other) have begun to shift in ways that invite new imaginaries and reconceptualizations of the already-existing (and future) universe. This is the new “posthumanist” imaginary we will explore this semester in English 396 as we adventure our way these debates.
	62424	Online	G	9:30AM -10:45AM	TR	n.a.	Wood, G	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/25/21-05/05/21 Special Approval: Departmental Approval Required Section Title: Can Poetry Save the Earth? Section Info: Can Poetry Save the Earth? Lyric poetry is a complex art form acutely observant of human motivation and behavior. A notable verse tradition also looks outward, training its eye on the natural phenomena of the world around us. As such, poetry is uniquely gifted to articulate human dependency on natural resources, and to map, psychologically, our apparently ungovernable impulses for environmental destruction. The early twenty-first century Anthropocene, when many vital ecosystems are nearing critical breakdown, marks an historical crossroads for human communities globally, and an urgent opportunity to re-evaluate our own cultural resources in meeting the global challenge of sustainability. A central question of the seminar will be resilience: what makes natural systems resilient, and can we apply the lessons of resilient ecology to poetry, to understand what enables certain poems to survive and speak across generations? More broadly, can so-called ecopoetry help us imagine a resilient, post-carbon life mode and politics? Discussion of key concepts in ecology and environmental history will supplement our readings in American nature poetry from the mid-nineteenth century to today.