2018-2019 University Catalog 
    
    Mar 28, 2024  
2018-2019 University Catalog archived

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ENGL 413 - Senior Research and Writing


Credits: 3


Prerequisites: Six credits in English at the 300 level, senior major standing, and instructor consent. Enrollment limited to six. A collaborative group research and writing project for senior majors, conducted in supervising faculty members’ areas of expertise, with directed independent study culminating in a substantial final project. Possible topics include ecocriticism, literature and psychology, material conditions of authorship, and documentary poetics.

Winter 2019, ENGL 413-01: Senior Research and Writing: Memoir (3). We live in the age of status updates and social media notifications. The selves we project in these platforms and in our daily conversations are often one-sided, a picture either of accomplishment and confidence, or of frustration. More complex representations of the self, of identity, and of individuality, appear in literary genres such as memoir, the personal essay, and fiction. This capstone considers concepts of memory, identity, experience, agency and audience as they inform readings of the novel Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, memoirs by Mary Karr, Deborah Miranda, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Marina Keegan, and personal essays by Joan Didion, Annie Dillard and selected Shenandoah writers. As we consider the narrative choices employed in these literary texts, as well as life narratives’ engagement with theories of identity, we develop expertise through research on a chosen autobiography. Then, in the final third of the course, we craft personal narratives of our own, tracing first memories, childhood scenes, and coming-of-age thresholds. These pieces reflect careful thinking about theories of selfhood, as well as specific writing tools, studied throughout the term. (HL) Gertz.

Fall 2018, ENGL 413-01: Senior Research and Writing: From Jane Eyre to Jane Steele: Adaptation, Homage, and Literary Fan Culture (3). From the 18th-century fascination with Shakespeare to the 21st-century obsession with Austen, adaptation and homage is a major part of literary culture. Sometimes, these adaptations become literary classics themselves: Jean Rhys’s Wild Sargasso Sea imagines the life and history of Jane Eyre’s madwoman in the attic; similarly, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours updates Mrs. Dalloway for the 1990s. Other times, however, these adaptations are pure fun: Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic detective fiction has been recently rewritten as The Lady Sherlock series; Austen’s work has been peppered with zombies and sea monsters; and the famously independent heroine of Brontë’s Jane Eyre has been reimagined as the homicidal protagonist of Lyndsay Faye’s Jane Steele. This course puts several instances of adaptation—both highbrow and lowbrow—in conversation with the critical theory on adaptation, homage, and fan culture. This reading prepares students to embark on an individual guided research project in the second half of the term. (HL) Walle.




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