ENGL 396

Spring 2023 Part of Term 1

Part of Term 1
Jan 17-May 3

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 2023
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	32113	Lecture-Discussion	D	11:00AM -12:15PM	TR	English Building	Somerville, S	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/17/23-05/03/23 Special Approval: Departmental Approval Required Section Info: SP23 ENGL 396, Siobhan Somerville - TOPIC: James Baldwin: Harlem, Paris, Istanbul. Novelist, essayist, playwright, poet. Preacher, civil rights activist, expatriate writer. Defying any single classification, genre, or location, James Baldwin (1924-1987) and his writing continue to complicate the ways we think about twentieth-century American literature, especially the overlapping histories of African American literature and lesbian/gay literature. This course will offer an opportunity to study Baldwin’s writing in depth, including novels, short stories, and essays. At the same time, we will consider the literary, cultural, and political contexts of his writing, including the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, the early lesbian and gay liberation movement, and the Black Power movement. Along the way, we will read selected critical and theoretical scholarship that sheds light on the politics of race, sexuality, and representation in Baldwin’s work.
	32114	Lecture-Discussion	X	2:00PM -3:15PM	MW	English Building	Loughran, T	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/17/23-05/03/23 Special Approval: Departmental Approval Required Section Info: SP23 ENGL 396 Trish Loughran TOPIC: Adventures in Posthumanism: What is it like to be a bird (or a tree or an eggplant)? Can a person fall in love with their computer? 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 ideas about “our” place in the physical universe. 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” and even 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 through these debates, giving equal time to reading critical theory (including feminist, queer, Indigenous, and postcolonial approaches to the nonhuman) and to a wide range of primary texts (which are likely to include novels, memoirs, and films).