ENGL 293 - Topics in American Literature

FDR: HL
Credits: 3-4

Winter 2018, ENGL 293A-01: Topics in American Literature: Wilderness, Wildness, and Cultivation: Contemporary Environmental Literature (3). In this course, we study American fascination with ideas of wilderness, wildness, and cultivation as they manifest in contemporary literature and thought. We discuss the implications of these categories for humans as members of ecosystems as well as of “advanced societies.” Our texts are at the cutting edge of environmental writing, drawing from poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, and including writers such as Camille T. Dungy, George Saunders, and Robin Wall-Kimmerer. We incorporate the work and live readings/talks of three exceptional environmental writers visiting the W&L campus this term: Ross Gay, Robert Macfarlane, and Anna Lena Phillips Bell. With the help of such authors, we test our own understandings of human roles in relation to the more-than-human world. (HL) Green.

Winter 2018, ENGL 293B-01: Topics in American Literature: Science Fiction (3). Our world—whether in its dystopian politics, climate catastrophes, or even just its driverless cars—is increasingly written of in terms once reserved for the fantastic tales of science fiction. Are we now living in a science-fictional universe? Is the genre even capable of describing where we now are, and where we go from here? In this course, we seek such answers by surveying science fiction from its beginnings to the present day. Authors read may include: Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, E.M. Forster, Hugo Gernsback, Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. LeGuin, Samuel R. Delany, Joanna Russ, Octavia Butler, William Gibson, Karen Joy Fowler, Ted Chuang, and others; through these works as well as a few short and feature-length films, TV episodes, radio dramas, podcasts, and games, we sample a range of past visions and speculate about the futures yet to come. (HL) Ferguson.

Winter 2018, ENGL 293C-01: Topics in American Literature: The American West (3). The American West is a land of striking landscapes, beautiful places to visit, such as Yellowstone and Yosemite, and stories that have had a huge impact on the USA and the world, such as Lewis and Clark, the Oregon Trail, Custer’s Last Stand, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, and Cowboy and Indian adventures galore. This course studies some of these Western places, stories, art works, and movies. What has made them so appealing? How have they been used? We study works by authors such as John Steinbeck, Frederic Remington, Willa Cather, Wallace Stegner, and Cormac McCarthy, plus movies with actors like John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Brad Pitt to see how Western stories have played out and what is happening now in these contested spaces. (HL) Smout.

Winter 2018, ENGL 293D-01: Topics in American Literature: The Literature of the Beat Generation (3). A study of a particular movement, focusing on the ways in which cultural and historical context have influenced the composition of and response to literature in the United States. This course examines the writings of such authors as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Anne Waldman, Bob Dylan, Gregory Corso, and Gary Snyder, who wrote starting in the mid-1940s, continued through later decades, and became loosely known as the Beat Generation. What cultural, literary, historical, and religious influences from the U.S. and other parts of the world have shaped their work? What challenges did their boldly different writings face, and how did their reception change over time? What are their themes? Their notions of style? What have they contributed to American (and world) life and letters? The goal of this course is to lay a strong foundation from which such questions can be richly addressed and answered. (HL) Ball.

Winter 2018, ENGL 293E-01: Topics in American Literature: Introduction to Literary Editing (3). An apprenticeship in editing for one or more students with the editor of Shenandoah, Washington and Lee’s nationally prominent literary magazine. This is a course for anyone interested in editing literary journals, writing for the literary community (blogs, news releases, two book reviews, features, business correspondence) and how both print and on-line journals operate. Often a stepping stone to a publication career, the course involves an introduction to the creation, design and maintenance of WordPress web sites, as well as a survey of current magazines. The course also offers opportunities for each student to practice generating and editing his/her own texts and those of his/her peers. Each student oversees one facet of the journal (Poem of the Week, blog, submissions management, contests, social media), and each makes a presentation to the class on the nature and practices of two other current literary journals. Students work in pairs toward an understanding of the role journals play in contemporary literature and engage in peer editing. (HL) Smith.

Winter 2018, ENGL 293F-01: Topics in American Literature: The American Short Story (3). This course is a study of the evolution of the short story in America from its roots, both domestic (Poe, Irving, Hawthorne, Melville) and international (Gogol, Chekhov, Maupassant), tracing the main branches of its development in the 20th century. We also explore more recent permutations of the genre, such as magical realism, new realism, and minimalism. Having gained an appreciation for the history and variety of this distinctly modern genre, we focus our attention on the work of two American masters of the form, contemporaries and erstwhile friends who frequently read and commented on each other’s work—Hemingway and Fitzgerald. We examine how they were influenced by their predecessors and by each other and how each helped to shape the genre. (HL) Oliver.

Winter 2018, ENGL 293G-01: Topics in American Literature: Tales of the Forest (3). In history and literature, the forest long loomed as the enemy of life and civilization, where monsters lurked, people wandered lost, and dark ends descended. That long tradition shifted dramatically during the 19th century with the accelerating pace of technological and economic development, widespread environmental degradation, and massive deforestation. As the founding of America’s national parks made plain, forests had suddenly become treasures to cherish and protect, refuges to seek for rejuvenation—and living guarantors of our collective survival. This course explores the forest’s evolution from sublime terror to vulnerable beauty, mainly through focusing upon poems, fairy tales, short stories, novels, and films—by a range of authors from Tacitus, Tasso, and Edmund Spenser to Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Muir, Robert Frost, J.R.R. Tolkien, Annie Proulx, and Stephen King—but with supplementary readings from major historians, environmental scientists, and forest scholars such as Alexandeer von Humboldt, G.P. Marsh, William Cronon, and Robert Pogue Harrison. (HL) Adams.

Winter 2018, ENGL 293H-01: Topics in British Literature: Race and the Zombie Apocalypse (3). This course takes a critical approach to our contemporary understanding of the figure of the zombie and its inextricable link to discourses on race and blackness in the Americas. A grounding in theories of social death allows us to explore the racial anxiety that gave birth to the genre and trace its development throughout the hemisphere. This course broadens the genre to include novels that normally would not be considered antecedents and ultimately poses the following questions: What can the figure of the zombie teach us about our evolving relationship to race? What does the recent proliferation of zombie-related television shows, movies, books, and video games say about our contemporary racial anxieties? In addition to landmark films from the genre, we consider works from, among others, Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead, Orlando Patterson, Claudia Rankine, and William Faulkner. (HL) Wilson.

Winter 2018, ENGL 293I-01: Topics in American Literature: Science Fiction (3). Our world—whether in its dystopian politics, climate catastrophes, or even just its driverless cars—is increasingly written of in terms once reserved for the fantastic tales of science fiction. Are we now living in a science-fictional universe? Is the genre even capable of describing where we now are, and where we go from here? In this course, we seek such answers by surveying science fiction from its beginnings to the present day. Authors read may include: Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, E.M. Forster, Hugo Gernsback, Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. LeGuin, Samuel R. Delany, Joanna Russ, Octavia Butler, William Gibson, Karen Joy Fowler, Ted Chuang, and others; through these works as well as a few short and feature-length films, TV episodes, radio dramas, podcasts, and games, we sample a range of past visions and speculate about the futures yet to come. (HL) Ferguson.

Spring 2018, ENGL 293-01: Topics in American Literature: Ralph Ellison and the Making of America (3). Prerequisite: Completion of the FW requirement. A study of the writings of Ralph Ellison, the great African-American novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. The course examines Ellison’s published and unpublished writings, as well as biographical and critical writings about Ellison’s life and work. We pursue such questions as Ellison’s concepts regarding American literature, music, history, region, language, and politics; the troubled and complex challenges of race in American culture; and how Ellison expresses what he called the American tragi-comedy in his work. (HL) Conner.

Spring 2018, ENGL 293-02: Topics in American Literature: Business in American Literature and Film (4). Prerequisite: Completion of the FW requirement. In his 1776 book The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith tells a powerful story of the free market as a way to organize our political and economic lives, a story that has governed much of the world ever since. This course studies that story, considers alternate stories of human economic organization, such as those of American Indian tribes, and sees how these stories have been acted out in American business and society. We study novels, films, short stories, non-fiction essays, autobiographies, advertisements, websites, some big corporations, and some local businesses in the Lexington area. Our goal is not to attack American business but to understand its characteristic strengths and weaknesses so we can make the best choices about how to live and work happily in a free market society. (HL) Smout.

Fall 2017, ENGL 293A-01: Topics in American Literature: Literary Editing (3). An apprenticeship in editing for one or more students with the editor of Shenandoah, Washington and Lee’s nationally prominent literary magazine. This is a course for anyone interested in editing literary journals, writing for the literary community (blogs, news releases, two book reviews, features, business correspondence), and how both print and on-line journals operate. Often a stepping stone to a publication career, the course involves an introduction to the creation, design, and maintenance of WordPress web sites, as well as a survey of current magazines. The course also offers opportunities for students to practice generating and editing their own texts and those of their peers. Each student oversees one facet of the journal (Poem of the Week, blog, submissions management, contests, social media), and each makes a presentation to the class on the nature and practices of two other current literary journals. Students work in pairs toward an understanding of the role journals play in contemporary literature and engage in peer editing. (HL) Smith.

Fall 2017, ENGL 293B-01:  Topics in American Literature:  Utopia, Science Fiction, and the Idea of America(s) (3).  What value does the utopian/dystopian text hold in the development of alternative thought?  This course, grounded in science fiction and the African American and Latin American contexts, addresses this question via the thoughtful examination of a range of theoretical, fictional, and cinematic texts.  Works studied throughout the term come from, among others, Carlos Fuentes, Thomas More, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Frederick Jameson, W.E.B. DuBois, Frances Bodomo, Alfonso Cuarón, Octavia Butler, and Samuel Delany. (HL) Wilson.