ENGL 292 - Topics in British Literature

FDR: HL
Credits: 3 in fall or winter, 4 in spring
Planned Offering: Fall, Winter

Prerequisite: Completion of the FW requirement. Studies in British literature, supported by attention to historical contexts. Versions of this course may survey several periods or concentrate on a group of works from a short span of time. Students develop their analytical writing skills in a series of short papers. May be repeated for degree credit if the topics are different.

Spring 2015 topic:

ENGL 292: Remembering the Great War (4). On the centenary of the Great War, we read the combatant-poets and memoirists, their contemporaries (modernists), and plays, films, and novels by writers of later generations. Authors include Pat Barker, Sebastian Barry, Rupert Brooke, H.D., T. S. Eliot, Sigmund Freud, Robert Graves, Ivor Gurney, David Jones, Joan Littlewood, Wilfred Owen, Jessie Pope, Siegfried Sassoon, and Isaac Rosenberg. In afternoon screenings, we will view All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Paths of Glory (1957), Gallipoli (1981), and War Horse (2011). Emphasis on the enduring images and changing tropes of the Great War. (HL) Keen.

Fall 2014 topic:

ENGL 292-01: Topics in British Literature: Seeing Gothic (3). Ruined castles, haunted houses, secret passages, apparitions, doppelgangers, vampires, monsters, murder, and madness–in short, the stuff of nightmares and the focus of this course. This class surveys the “gothic”: works dealing with the horrific, the grotesque, the uncanny, and the supernatural. We begin by examining the first appearance of gothic novels in the presumptively rational and clearheaded eighteenth century (authors include Walpole, Radcliffe, and Beckford) before turning to some notorious nineteenth-century examples of the genre (such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and stories by Edgar Allan Poe). Our ultimate aim, though, is to track how these earlier gothic works influenced twentieth-century horror cinema. To that end, we read the aforementioned texts alongside gothic films like Kubrick’s The Shining, Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, Dreyer’s Vampyr, Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu, and Aronofsky’s Black Swan. Along the way, we see that gothic texts continually blur the thin line between madness and sanity, make a place for the supernatural in an increasingly rationalized world, and force us to face the limits of human experience. (HL) Staff