ENGL 299 - Seminar for Prospective Majors

FDR: HL
Credits: 3

Winter 2016, ENGL 299-01: Seminar for Prospective Majors: Superhero Comics (3). This research-intensive writing course focuses on the character type of the superhero as featured in graphic narratives. Students study both the genre of the superhero and the formal elements of comics as a hybrid art combining words and pictures. Early texts include Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Superman episodes in Action Comics, and Bill Finger and Bob Kane’s Batman episodes in Detective Comics. Later texts trace the development of superhero narratives as a genre and research paper. (HL) Gavaler.

Winter 2016, ENGL 299-02: Seminar for Prospective Majors: Shakespeare’s Magic (3). In this gateway course, students focus on three of Shakespeare’s most magical plays–A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, and The Tempest. We put these plays in the context of other portrayals of magic in early modern England. We have a chance to see live professional productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Actors from the London Stage) and The Tempest (American Shakespeare Center). Students develop independent research projects while exploring different theoretical perspectives on the plays. In the process, we explore as a class not only Shakespeare’s depiction of magic but also the magic of Shakespeare. (HL) Pickett.

Fall 2015, ENGL 299-01: Seminar for Prospective Majors: Apocalyptic Narratives (3). Ranging from ancient accounts of floods and plagues, the fall of great cities, and the final revelation to such contemporary texts as Doctor Strangelove, Interstellar, and World War Z, apocalyptic narratives are perhaps the oldest and remain among the most popular genres. In addition, this tradition vividly illustrates one of the most important practical functions of the serious study of literature, that is, how literature allows us to imagine and thereby “game out” scenarios that seldom, if ever, have really happened and that cannot be isolated for study in a lab because by definition they involve the possible end of the human race. Likely texts include histories, poems, films, and novels such as book 2 of The Aeneid, The Book of Revelations, Frankenstein, The War of the Worlds, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Salem’s Lot, Oryx and Crake, Aliens, The Road, and Noah. (HL) Adams.

Fall 2015, ENGL 299-02: Seminar for Prospective Majors: The (M.) Butterfly Effect (3). Marco Polo, in his Travels, boasts of no fewer than 20,000 courtesans ready to serve foreign emissaries and merchants visiting the imperial court of the Great Khan. The East, simultaneously there and here, is always already exoticized and eroticized. This course examines the parallel constructions and representations of Eastern spaces, bodies, genders, and sexualities that continue to haunt the Western imaginary. Central to the discursive history of Orientalism is the figure of Madame Butterfly–geisha, lover, mother, and wife. Alongside and against Cho-Cho San, however, are the Dragon Lady, Mulan the female warrior, and men who intentionally or unwittingly assume the role of the Butterfly. Between fantasy and reality, is the East an effect of cross-cultural encounters? Or does it affect its own figurations in a complex network of negotiations? Cultural artifacts include Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème; John Luther Long’s original short story and later novella Madame Butterfly, as well as David Belasco’s play, Giacomo Puccini’s opera, David Henry Hwang’s play M. Butterfly, and Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil’s musical Miss Saigon; Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha; the legends of Mulan and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior; Graham Greene’s The Quiet American; and Marguerite Duras’ The Lover. We also look at various cinematic adaptations and visual traditions of the Butterfly, including Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1956 Sisters of the Gion, Jerry Lewis’ 1958 The Geisha Boy, the films of Anna May Wong, and the works of Margaret Cho. Emphases are on the practice of close reading, introduction to literary theory, and critical research skills. A series of short papers culminate in a long research paper. (HL) Kao.

  Planned Offering: Fall, Winter