ENGL 350

Fall 2023 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 2023
CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
71519	Online	E	1:00PM -1:50PM	MWF	n.a.	Baron, I	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/21/23-12/06/23 Degree Notes: Advanced Composition course. Credit: 3 hours Section Title: Writing Lit, Text & Culture Section Info: FA23 ENGL 350 Writing Lit, Text & Culture - Iryce Baron: You’ve Come a Long Way Baby: Marriage and Maternity in 20th Century British Fiction In 1968 Benson and Hedges created a new cigarette exclusively for women called Virginia Slims. This new branding offered a more tapered and longer design to convey to customers that smoking was no longer just for men. To further attract female smokers, the cigarettes were wrapped in trendy floral paper, suggesting that Virginia Slims were a necessary fashion accessory for modern women. The ads featured a before and after motif, focusing in the past on a young Victorian woman in a corseted dress being punished for engaging in the unladylike act of smoking. In the present, a pencil thin young woman in a mini skirt emerges smoking Virginia Slims with the theme tune, You’ve Come a Long Way Baby, playing as she asserts her rightful place in society. But had women actually come a long way since the advent of the Suffrage movement and the different waves of 20th century feminism? We’ll follow the rise of British feminist fiction as a cultural metric to examine the role of women as they asserted their rights for gender equality throughout the 20th century. We’ll study how the Suffrage movement created a niche for women to evolve from being submissive domestic drones to becoming militant protestors, moving from peaceful demonstrations to destroying male owned property and facing imprisonment. As we move through the 20th century, we’ll explore how women in the UK won the right to be enfranchised in two stages and how the World Wars offered them the ability to enter what had traditionally been male-dominated fields. We’ll study the way they reacted when the wars were over and they were expected to be rehomed in the domestic sphere. We’ll discuss how women disgruntled with the thought of turning back the clock on gender reform became even more militant about the sanctity of their bodies and their sexual orientation, refusing to measure their success through marriage and maternity. We’ll examine changes in clothing for women, how contraception shaped their lives and the role that education had in erasing restrictive gender roles as they entered universities in large numbers, becoming scientists, academics, lawyers, doctors and politicians, including becoming the first female Prime Minister of the UK. Ultimately, we’ll see whether women shed the repressive expectations of the past, refusing to view themselves only along traditional gender lines as they embraced more nuanced permutations of being female through LGBTQ identities or whether they were forced to accept that biology is indeed destiny. Students are expected to attend class and to actively engage in discussions. Students will be required to write four 5-6 page papers. The following novels and films may be included in the course: Suffragette, A Room With a View, To the Lighthouse, After Leaving Mr. MacKenzie, Excellent Women, The Ginger Tree, Possession, and Bridget Jones’s Diary. Restriction(s): Restricted to English or Creative Writing major(s) or minor(s).
71515	Lecture-Discussion	F	2:00PM -2:50PM	MWF	119 English Building	Mortensen, P	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/21/23-12/06/23 Degree Notes: Advanced Composition course. Credit: 3 hours Section Title: Writing Lit, Text & Culture Section Info: FA23 ENGL 350 Writing Lit, Text & Culture - Peter Mortensen: Reinventing the University, We’ll begin by conjuring a vision of U.S. public research universities on the cusp of the internet era. Jane Smiley’s Moo (1995) and Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2 (1995) will get us started, as will excerpts from Bill Readings’ The University in Ruins (1996). Then we’ll pick our way forward in time by writing about provocations—in fiction and nonfiction, on page and screen—that trouble the university as it was thirty years ago. The end of that troubling is the institution we know today. Is its reinvention what anyone might have hoped for? You’ll render your verdict in a culminating project that evaluates contemporary narratives by and about public research universities such as Illinois. Restriction(s): Restricted to English or Creative Writing major(s) or minor(s).
71517	Lecture-Discussion	Q2	12:30PM -1:50PM	TR	139 Loomis Laboratory	Freeburg, C	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/21/23-12/06/23 Degree Notes: Advanced Composition course. Credit: 3 hours Section Title: Writing Lit, Text & Culture Section Info: FA23 ENGL 350 Writing Lit, Text & Culture - Christopher Freeburg: Black Power and Black Arts - The Black Arts Movement of the 1960s was a fascinating time for American literature and culture. Social movements and counter movements were thriving and shaping novels, essays, poetry, and plays in the US. This course investigates how Black political movements shaped calls for new language and new belief systems in the work of literary artists such as Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ernest Gaines, Nikki Giovanni, and Toni Morrison. We will also examine how central the notion of a new Black culture was to an emergent Black politics and changing sense of mass culture in the 1970s. Restriction(s): Restricted to English or Creative Writing major(s) or minor(s).