ENGL 455

Spring 2024 All Classes

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Credit: 3 OR 4 hours.

Intensive study of the work of one or two major authors.

3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours. May be repeated with permission of English advising office to a maximum of 6 undergraduate hours if topics vary. May be repeated for graduate credit if topics vary. Prerequisite: One year of college literature or consent of instructor.

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ENGL 455 class schedule data for spring 2024
CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
32205	Lecture-Discussion	1G	8:00AM -9:15AM	TR	69 English Building	Hunt, I	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/16/24-05/01/24 Credit: 4 hours Section Info: SP24 - ENGL 455 - Major Authors - Irvin Hunt - Black Arts Movement - The Black Arts Movement was the cultural arm of the Black Power Movement. It was an explosion of experimental art between the 1960s and 1970s, art that crossed a range of genres: jazz, drama, poetry, essays, novels, visual art, sculpture, film, oratory, and more. We will deep-dive into all of them. Because the creators of these works were in extensive conversation with each other, they smudge the boundaries between artistic forms and likewise question the whole idea of singular authorship. What new stuff do we hear in a poem when read through the music of jazz? How do we understand the process of creativity and the created work itself differently when read as collective efforts? As we keep in mind these big questions about how we read art and what defines it, we will probe issues specific to the times: theories of “the Black aesthetic,” the role of performance in the creation of a movement, the promises and pitfalls of Black cultural nationalism, the reach of Black internationalism, and the formative role of “Black Power feminism.” This course will be an intensive introduction to the Black Arts Movement and to the questions that shape our understanding of the nature of art itself. We will close read artists such as Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Sun Ra, Haki Madhubuti, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ntozake Shange, Gil Scott-Heron, Thelonious Monk, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Faith Ringgold, Benny Andrews, and Lorraine Hansberry. Restriction(s): Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.
32202	Lecture-Discussion	1U	8:00AM -9:15AM	TR	69 English Building	Hunt, I	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/16/24-05/01/24 Credit: 3 hours Section Info: SP24 - ENGL 455 - Major Authors - Irvin Hunt - Black Arts Movement - The Black Arts Movement was the cultural arm of the Black Power Movement. It was an explosion of experimental art between the 1960s and 1970s, art that crossed a range of genres: jazz, drama, poetry, essays, novels, visual art, sculpture, film, oratory, and more. We will deep-dive into all of them. Because the creators of these works were in extensive conversation with each other, they smudge the boundaries between artistic forms and likewise question the whole idea of singular authorship. What new stuff do we hear in a poem when read through the music of jazz? How do we understand the process of creativity and the created work itself differently when read as collective efforts? As we keep in mind these big questions about how we read art and what defines it, we will probe issues specific to the times: theories of “the Black aesthetic,” the role of performance in the creation of a movement, the promises and pitfalls of Black cultural nationalism, the reach of Black internationalism, and the formative role of “Black Power feminism.” This course will be an intensive introduction to the Black Arts Movement and to the questions that shape our understanding of the nature of art itself. We will close read artists such as Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Sun Ra, Haki Madhubuti, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ntozake Shange, Gil Scott-Heron, Thelonious Monk, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Faith Ringgold, Benny Andrews, and Lorraine Hansberry. Restriction(s): Not intended for students with Freshman class standing. Restricted to Undergrad - Urbana-Champaign.
32210	Lecture-Discussion	2G	12:30PM -1:45PM	TR	113 Davenport Hall	Loughran, T	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/16/24-05/01/24 Credit: 4 hours Section Info: SP24 - ENGL 455 - Major Authors - Patricia Loughran - Weird Writers: Old and New Weird - This course will be devoted to one hundred years of the Weird, as imagined in the minds of H.P. Lovecraft, Victor Lavalle, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and Jeff VanderMeer. The genre we call “Weird Fiction” was once thought beneath serious consideration by scholars because of its longstanding ties to lower-class pulp, juvenile, and amateur literary cultures. In recent years, however, the genre has gained momentum and respect because it expresses something important about what it feels like to be alive in our increasingly weird 21C world. In particular, as we shall see, weird writers offer a timely and apocalyptic critique of all forms of previous knowing, including the extensive scientific, philosophical, and political systems on which our current “reality” is based, making this genre an important platform from which to consider the epistemological and often existential challenges we face today, from deepfakes to climate change. In this course, we’ll spend our time constructing a robust genealogy of this decidedly post- (and anti-) modern genre, tracking it origins in the early twentieth-century magazine Weird Tales before turning to its contemporary renaissance, via an array of recent authors who have begun to speak back to the earlier tradition with a genre that calls itself “the New Weird.” Along the way we will read many weird novels and stories (filled with madmen, mushroom-people, extra-terrestrials, and other knowledge-defying blob-monsters of the deep), play at least one weird videogame (time permitting), and investigate some pretty weird scholarship from some of today’s most powerful speculative theorists--who, it turns out, are just as interested in weird things as our four weird writers are. Our most recurrent question will be—what counts as “Weird” and why are readers so interested in it right now? Restriction(s): Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.
32207	Lecture-Discussion	2U	12:30PM -1:45PM	TR	113 Davenport Hall	Loughran, T	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/16/24-05/01/24 Credit: 3 hours Section Info: SP24 - ENGL 455 - Major Authors - Patricia Loughran - Weird Writers: Old and New Weird - This course will be devoted to one hundred years of the Weird, as imagined in the minds of H.P. Lovecraft, Victor Lavalle, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and Jeff VanderMeer. The genre we call “Weird Fiction” was once thought beneath serious consideration by scholars because of its longstanding ties to lower-class pulp, juvenile, and amateur literary cultures. In recent years, however, the genre has gained momentum and respect because it expresses something important about what it feels like to be alive in our increasingly weird 21C world. In particular, as we shall see, weird writers offer a timely and apocalyptic critique of all forms of previous knowing, including the extensive scientific, philosophical, and political systems on which our current “reality” is based, making this genre an important platform from which to consider the epistemological and often existential challenges we face today, from deepfakes to climate change. In this course, we’ll spend our time constructing a robust genealogy of this decidedly post- (and anti-) modern genre, tracking it origins in the early twentieth-century magazine Weird Tales before turning to its contemporary renaissance, via an array of recent authors who have begun to speak back to the earlier tradition with a genre that calls itself “the New Weird.” Along the way we will read many weird novels and stories (filled with madmen, mushroom-people, extra-terrestrials, and other knowledge-defying blob-monsters of the deep), play at least one weird videogame (time permitting), and investigate some pretty weird scholarship from some of today’s most powerful speculative theorists--who, it turns out, are just as interested in weird things as our four weird writers are. Our most recurrent question will be—what counts as “Weird” and why are readers so interested in it right now? Restriction(s): Not intended for students with Freshman class standing. Restricted to Undergrad - Urbana-Champaign.