ENGL 396

Spring 2022 Part of Term 1

Part of Term 1
Jan 18-May 4

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 2022
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	32113	Lecture-Discussion	D	11:00AM -12:15PM	TR	156 English Building	Jones, J	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/18/22-05/04/22 Special Approval: Departmental Approval Required Section Title: Literature and the Sea Section Info: SP22 English 396: Topics in Literature and Environment - Topic: Literature and the Sea The sea is a persistent metaphor for ideas as vast as the ocean itself: freedom, death, fluidity, sexual awakening, and escape. At the same time, the sea is more than a metaphor. The sea is a factory and workplace, a place where cultural exchange, trade relationships, and political power are all made material in the bodies of working sailors. The sea and its creatures are also sites of environmental change and climate crisis. This course will explore oceanic texts, answering questions such as: • What does the sea mean for authors of various races, genders, sexual identities, and ethnicities? • How has the literature of the sea contributed to environmental (and environmentalist) concerns? • How does American literature respond to the changes in oceanic and coastal economies and ecologies? • How does sea literature construct new categories of local, national, and global belonging? Most of our readings come from 19th-century U.S. literature, including works by Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Kate Chopin, Sarah Orne Jewett and others. We will also read texts, watch films, and view art from across a much wider expanse of time and place. The course ends with a short unit on contemporary maritime cultures: container shipping, leisure cruising, and globalization. Along with literary texts, we will study book illustrations, tattoos, paintings and magazine articles. We will explore a variety of critical approaches, including oceanic studies, critical race theory, ecocriticism, and visual culture.
	32114	Lecture-Discussion	X	12:00PM -1:15PM	MW	156 English Building	Jenkins, C	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/18/22-05/04/22 Special Approval: Departmental Approval Required Section Title: Theorizing Hip Hop Section Info: SP22 ENGL 396 - Theorizing Hip Hop: Hip Hop (as) Narrative - In this class we will apply the tools of literary theory and criticism to hip hop artistry. We’ll think about rap music not only as a lyric form, but as a narrative one: a medium of storytelling. While we will explicate individual recordings, our larger goal will be to theorize hip hop as national discourse and contemporary cultural artifact. To that end, our study will include much recent scholarship on hip hop, particularly new analyses of hip hop aesthetics that expand upon earlier, purely historical treatments. In our work with both primary and secondary texts, we will consider the kinds of stories that rap music tells, including those it tells about the nature of hip hop itself (hip hop meta-narratives). We’ll also explore how hip hop culture is deployed in the telling of other types of stories, and in other media (the novel, film, visual art). Focusing primarily on work from the last twenty to twenty-five years, the course is organized thematically, addressing topics that recur in the music and in the culture more broadly. Our central objective will be to gain a more nuanced understanding of rap music’s aesthetic and cultural significance, through critical analysis of hip hop as performance and as social metaphor.