ENGL 291 - Seminar

FDR: HL, GE3
Credits: 3
When Offered: Fall, Winter

Prerequisites: Completion of FW or GE1 composition requirement. Permission to enroll must be secured from the professor.This course studies a group of works related by theme, by culture, by topic, by genre, or by the critical approach taken to the works. Some recent topics have been the Southern Short Story; Gender and Passion in the 19th-Century Novel; Chivalry, Honor, and the Romance; and Appalachian Literature. May be repeated for degree credit with permission and if the topics are different.

Topics for Winter, 2010:

ENGL 291A: Seminar: Western Encounters with the Islamic World (1100-1600). A study of medieval and 16th-century Western texts that imagine Muslims sometimes as culturally other and sometimes fundamentally the same as Westerners, sometimes as monstrous or demonic and sometimes as honorable. When Muslims threaten to conquer Europe, texts replay the two great conflicts between Islamdom and Christendom: the invasion of Spain, France and Italy in the 8th and 9th centuries (The Song of Roland) and the First Crusade (an eyewitness history and Tasso’s Jerusalem Liberated). By contrast, in the influential travel, chivalric, and pilgrimage literature, Westerners report the achievements of Islamic civilization in the Middle East and beyond. The seminar begins with how medieval Muslims imagined themselves and imagined their relations with Christians, Jews, and other religious communities (the great Arabian story collection, The Arabian Nights or The Thousand and One Nights). All texts read in translation. Discussion throughout on the roots of how non-Muslims conceive of Muslim culture today. Craun

ENGL 291B: Seminar: Contemporary Iranian Women Writers. In this course we explore the connections between women’s lives, Iranian cultural and political systems, and human rights struggles as they have been dramatized in contemporary Iranian and Iranian-American literature. Readings, all in English, consider both the potential and the limitations of fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry to not only represent the experiences of Iranian women but also to elucidate such broad concepts as “the human,” “freedom of expression,” “political persecution,” and “torture.” While this is primarily a literature course, we often take an interdisciplinary approach to our readings, considering both modern Iranian history and international human rights policy and expanding our discussions with a selection of Iranian documentaries and films. Darznik
Staff.