ENGL 292 - Topics in British Literature

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

Spring 2017, ENGL 292-01: Topic in British Literature: Utopian or Dystopian? (4). Prerequisite: Completion of the FW requirement. Over a decade ago, celebrated contemporary British science fiction and fantasy writer Gwyneth Jones’s Bold as Love sequence anticipated both devolution and “Brexit” in an award-winning series published between 2001-2006. With titles drawn from Jimi Hendrix tunes and allusions to Arthurian legend, Shakespeare’s history plays, English folk-tales, American westerns, and Chinese opera, the Bold as Love novels defy generic categories. Theories explored and tested include intertextuality and intermediality, sources and influences, and generic hybrids. (HL) Keen. Spring 2017 only

Spring 2017, ENGL 292-02:  Middlemarch & Devoted Readers (4). Not open to students who have taken ENGL 299. Prerequisite: Completion of FW requirement. This seminar begins with and centers upon George Eliot’s Middlemarch, a novel often regarded as one of the greatest and most ambitious produced in the era of the novel’s securest cultural dominance and famously described by Virginia Woolf as one of the “few English novels written for grown-up people.” It then problematizes this encounter by setting it in light of Rebecca’s Mead’s critically-acclaimed My Life in Middlemarch, a memoir of her devoted lifelong reading and reading of it, not just for pleasure but for its profound wisdom and insight. The question of such intense admiration verging on fandom is one that has received increasing scholarly attention, particularly in relation to the so-called Janeite phenomenon, that is, the love of Jane Austen fans for her novels, but extends to numerous other novelists, poets, playwrights, fun-makers, and their fans. Students supplement this focus of the course by researching and presenting their own exemplary case studies of such readerly devotion, obsession, or fandom. (HL) Adams.

Winter 2017, ENGL 292A-01: Topics in British Literature: A Monstrous Creation: Frankenstein and its Intertexts (3). Much like the creature who haunts its pages, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is itself an assemblage of parts. Drawing on numerous literary and philosophical precedents, Shelley’s groundbreaking novel is at once deeply familiar and shockingly new. Placing Frankenstein at its center, this course begins with texts that Shelley invokes—including Paradise Lost, Prometheus, Rousseau, and Coleridge, among others—and ends with texts that she inspires. In so doing, we consider not only the common mythology, questions, and concerns that all of these texts share, but also the nature of literary allusion, homage, and adaptation. Why does the Genesis story remain so central to the Western literary tradition? Why is Shelley’s creature an especially compelling representation of humankind’s fallen condition? Why does Shelley’s novel continue to resonate with modern audiences, two hundred years after its publication? (HL) Walle.

Winter 2017, ENGL 292B-01: Topics in British Literature: Children’s Literature: Grimm, Wilde, and Peculiar (3). Enthusiasts of children’s literature will appreciate this romp through the strange, uncut folklore of the Brothers Grimm and the beautiful, subversive fairy tales of Oscar Wilde. In addition to reading the original stories, participants engage with modern picture book versions and academic discourse on the texts and contexts. Lastly, students hunt for the “Grimm” and the “Wilde” in young adult works, including the short stories of Neil Gaiman and the book Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.” (HL) Harrington

Fall 2016, ENGL 292-01: Topics in British Literature: Modern British Poetry (3).  This course covers poetry from 1870 through the twenty-first century, asking how British poets have pushed the limits of traditional verse.  British poets are known for being less innovative than their American and Continental peers.  We sample poems by Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams before asking:  what did “experimentation” mean to Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy?  And how did Yeats experiment with history in his poems, as opposed to Ezra Pound?  We also see how female poets, such as Edith Sitwell and Stevie Smith, developed highly original voices, and we end by sampling the works of more recent poets, including an influx of immigrant writers. (HL) Brodie.

Fall 2016, ENGL 292B-01: Topics in British Literature: All About Eve (3).  Heavy hangs the head of the first woman.  From Genesis to the femmes fatales of film noir, the figure of Eve—cunning, seductive, and treacherous—is arguably the most powerful and enduring image of woman in Western literature.  Eve’s story and its permutations encapsulate several fundamental dilemmas in the representation of women, from Milton to the present day.  Does a woman’s sexuality make her blameworthy?  Does her influence make her dangerous?  Does her “disobedience” make her criminal?  Looking at a variety of media—novels, poetry, graphic novels, and film—this course examines shifting portrayals of Eve and her implications for womanhood and female sexuality.  Anchoring our conversation in Genesis and Milton, and then moving to Shelley, Hardy, Carter, and others, we consider what each era’s version of Eve reveals about the perception of women, whether the depiction of Eve changes over time, and how Eve’s legacy of guilt and temptation informs modern discussions of femininity. (HL) Walle.