ENGL 350

Fall 2022 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 2022
CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
71515	Online	D	1:00PM -1:50PM	MWF	n.a.	Baron, I	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/22/22-12/07/22 Degree Notes: Advanced Composition course. Credit: 3 hours Section Title: Writing Lit, Text & Culture Section Info: FA22 - ENGL 350, Iryce Baron Topic Memory and Nationalism 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 mutiplistic 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 can either be seen as a flourishing or flagging political standard. We’ll determine whether British citizens have prospered from modern Socialist policies 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 racial purity. Our thematic anchor will be the importance of individual and collective memory to define social progress or to incite class war. Through the medium of memory, we’ll focus our attentions on the history of class politics in Britain over the last few decades. We’ll explore whether the future lies with traditional parties such as the Tories, Labour and the Liberal Democrats, or with right-winged groups such as the British National Party, English Defense 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 Anglocentic literary and political memories. And finally we’ll consider whether Britain has become an enlightened utopia where social mobility is universal or whether it is 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. We’ll watch episodes from British TV series such as The Crown and novels may include: Never Let Me Go, Atonement, The Remains of the Day, Small Island, The Half Blood Prince, The Sense of An Ending, and Hamnet Restriction(s): Restricted to English or Creative Writing major(s) or minor(s).
71517	Online	M	12:00PM -12:50PM	MWF	n.a.	Nazar, H	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/22/22-12/07/22 Degree Notes: Advanced Composition course. Credit: 3 hours Section Title: Writing Lit, Text & Culture Section Info: FA22 - ENGL 350, Hina Nazar Topic: Happiness and the Enlightenment In 2011, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 65/309 (Happiness: Towards a Holistic Definition of Development), calling on member countries to make happiness an index of national prosperity. This led, in 2012, to the publication of the first ever World Happiness Report and a global convention on happiness—hosted, appropriately, by Bhutan, a country that had long prioritized “Gross National Happiness” over “Gross National Product.” In 2018, Psychology Professor Laurie Santos made history at Yale University when a quarter of Yale’s undergraduate student body signed up for her new course, “Happiness and the Good Life” (Professor Santos’s Happiness Lab podcast has been downloaded by more than 35 million people worldwide). In 2021, the global wellness industry was valued at over $1.3 trillion, and the COVID19 pandemic is expected to spur further growth of the industry. Clearly, today, we are deeply preoccupied with happiness as a goal, and have been, arguably, ever since the Declaration of Independence of 1776 identified “the pursuit of happiness,” in addition to life and liberty, as an inalienable right. This course seeks to situate our modern interest in—and for some, our elitist and counter-productive obsession with—happiness in a larger cultural and intellectual history that began in the century preceding the Declaration of Independence, at the beginning of the period we call the Enlightenment. In England, this was a time when new “mechanical” philosophies of human nature were transforming earlier Christian conceptions of both happiness and human nature, away from the idea that we are immortal souls, whose happiness lies in a union with God in the afterlife, to the modern understanding that human animals are driven by the pursuit of this-worldly happiness, with happiness incorporating physical and material well-being. The good or happy life, it was increasingly argued, requires something more than being good; it also entails feeling good. Indeed, according to John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), a crucial influence on the Declaration of Independence, it is virtually impossible to be good unless you feel good about being good. This course considers how “being good” and “feeling good,” virtue and pleasure, interacted in Enlightenment literature and philosophy to enable the late eighteenth-century codification of a fundamental right to happiness. Readings include works (in whole or part) such as Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure (1668), Locke’s Essay, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740), Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759), Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789), and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813). English 350 seeks at once to place the modern idea of happiness in a wider historical context and to bring into focus the writing process that is such an integral part of your happiness or misery as undergraduates. Through workshops, revisions, and peer review, the course aims to help you build the skills required for doing research in English, including developing strong argumentative theses and paper topics, constructing a cogent and current bibliography, and situating your work in a wider scholarly conversation. Restriction(s): Restricted to English or Creative Writing major(s) or minor(s).
71519	Lecture-Discussion	X	9:30AM -10:45AM	TR	G30 Foreign Languages Building	McKinney, C	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/22/22-12/07/22 Degree Notes: Advanced Composition course. Credit: 3 hours Section Info: FA22 - ENGL 350 Disney, Identity, and Feminism: A Whole New World What might we observe by viewing Disney films through a feminist lens? From Cinderella to Moana, we will read and apply feminist concepts to analyze the power and influence of Disney’s most popular heroines. We will adopt a focused lens to analyze each film, such as: sex, gender, sexuality, race, nationality, class, disability, body size, age, etc. By applying a feminist lens, we will expand and strengthen our analytical skills to track patterns of representation and engagement across the global franchise. If you enroll in this class, you should feel willing to critically interrogate some of your favorite and most nostalgic movies. Otherwise, come as you are -- no previous knowledge or experience is required. Restriction(s): Restricted to English major(s) or minor(s).