ENGL 299 - Seminar for Prospective Majors

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

Topics for Winter, 2010:

ENGL 299A: Seminar for Prospective Majors: Western American Literature (3). The American West is one of the great battlegrounds in world history, a place where many ethnic groups have come into contact with each other and have fought for their land, their economic livelihood, their culture, their families, their names, their ethnic identities, and virtually everything else human beings can fight for. We study some key Western writers representing these different ethnic groups, analyzing their competing stories of who won the West and who ought to own and shape it now. These writers include Wallace Stegner, John Steinbeck, Willa Cather, Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch, and Maxine Hong Kingston. We also study some Western films in order to understand the amazing power of stories to create the realities we live. (HL, GE3) Smout

ENGL 299B: Seminar for Prospective Majors: Ethics and Reading: Spenser and Chaucer (3). A study of how Shakespeare explores the classical/Christian virtues of justice, equity, and mercy in The Faerie Queene, especially Book V. A parallel study of how Chaucer explores the multifaceted basic good of medieval secular culture, honor in men and women, in several of the Canterbury Tales (“The Knight’s Tale,” “The Franklin’s Tale,” “The Man of Law’s Tale,” “The Physician’s Tale,” etc.). Alongside the literary texts, brief sections of philosophical texts on justice, honor, and the ethical basis of human action; also discussion of some recent theory on reading imaginative literature as an inherently ethical activity. Students may write the research paper, to be developed in stages over the last third of the term, on either writer. (HL, GE3) Craun

Topics for Fall, 2009:

ENGL 299A: Seminar for Prospective Majors: Becoming Jane (3). This course examines Jane Austen’s early novels in the context of other writers who influenced her development. We sample large excerpts from Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel, Pamela, before examining Austen’s use of the epistolary form in Lady Susan. Next we read Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho to appreciate Austen’s comic use of that novel in Northanger Abbey. Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling shows the culture of sensibility behind Sense and Sensibility, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman outlines ideas about women’s education that Austen explores in Pride and Prejudice. The course ends by jumping forward to Austen’s last completed novel, Persuasion, to conclude an ongoing discussion of the influence of Romanticism on her work. (HL, GE3) Brodie

ENGL 299B: Seminar for Prospective Majors: Ways to Greatness: Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson (3). This course gives an in-depth reading of the two greatest American poets of the 19th (or perhaps any) century. How did they achieve greatness, and what constitutes greatness? We place both poets in their historical context, and we also consider the critical context of the century since their deaths. We find many opportunities for close reading, for scholarly research, and for critical discussions. The double goal of the course is to introduce prospective English majors to the kind of work they are expected to do in upper-division courses and to develop their skills as readers and writers. (HL, GE3) Warren