ENGL 293 - Topics in American Literature

FDR: HL
Credits: 3-4

Spring 2022, ENGL 293-01: Topics in American Literature: Business in Lit and Film (4).  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 films, short stories, non-fiction essays, autobiographies, poems, advertisements, websites, some big corporations, and some local businesses. 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.

Winter 2022, ENGL 293A-01: Topics in American Literature: Literature of the Forest (3).  Prerequisite: Completion of the FDR FW requirement. Narratives set in and around forests, especially tales of adventure, danger, and even horror, run throughout the course of human history from the earliest surviving examples of story-telling to the present.  More pointedly, major theories of literature and civilization (concepts often equated) have long noted and explored the profound opposition to the forest seen as the enemy or, as one noted critic calls it, the “shadow” of civilization to the great project of civilization.  This course surveys the development from the forest seen in such terms to our current, increasingly anxious sense that humankind’s long war with forests in now culminating in their looming destruction—and perhaps, as a consequence, our own.  Texts range from fairytales and short stories, through essays and poems, to novels and films with a few non-English language writers such as Tacitus, Madame de la Mothe, and the Brothers Grimm but the majority selected from a list including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Robert Frost through Stephen King, Annie Proulx, and several contemporary filmmakers.  Possible theorists include G.P. Marsh, Robert Pogue Harrison, Timothy Morton, and Amitav Ghosh. (HL) Adams.

Winter 2022, ENGL 293B-01: Topics in American Literature: Literature and Film of the American West (3). Prerequisite: Completion of the FDR FW requirement. 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 Trial, 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 Kevin Costner to see how Western stories have played out and what is happening now in these contested spaces. (HL) Smout.

Winter 2022, ENGL 293C-01: Topics in American Literature: Asian American Literature (3). Prerequisite: Completion of the FDR FW requirement. A study of literatures by Asian-American authors, with a focus on how Asian Americans—broadly and inclusively defined—have transformed the social, political, and cultural landscapes of the United States. With such topics as immigration and refugee politics, racism and xenophobia, exclusion and internment, civil-rights activism, the post-9/11 period, and the model-minority myth, our selected texts (novels, poetry, short stories) present both a historical and an intimate look into the lives of individuals who articulate what it means to identify as Asian American in the modern and contemporary United States. Potential texts include John Okada’s No-No Boy, Ted Chiang’s The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate, Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You, R. O. Kwon’s The Incendiaries, and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. (HL) Kharputly.

Winter 2022, ENGL 293D-01: Topics in American Literature: Form and Freedom in Modern American Poetry (3). Prerequisite: Completion of the FDR FW requirement. This survey course in American poetry will extend from Walt Whitman in the nineteenth century through Tracy Smith, today. We’ll focus on how American poets have experimented with all kinds of free verse and traditional forms, including Langston Hughes’s blues poetry, Sylvia Plath’s syllabic verse, and Joy Harjo’s prose poems. Robert Frost once said that “writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net.” This course will look at the net in William Carlos Williams’s poems and the freedom in Frost’s. (HL) Brodie.

Winter 2022, ENGL 293E-01: Topics in American Literature: Nature as Self: Environmental Literature in the Anthropocene (3). Prerequisite: Completion of the FDR FW requirement. In this course we study American ideas of Nature and Self in environmental literature. We discuss wilderness, cultivation, loss, hope, and interconnection for humans as members of societies and of ecosystems. Texts come from the cutting edge of EcoWriting (Robin Wall-Kimmerer, Ross Gay, Camille Dungy, and many more) with a framing in traditional environmental literature (Thoreau, Whitman, etc.) and in environmental theory (William Cronon, Robert Macfarlane, etc.). With the help of these thinkers, we test our own understandings of human relationships to the more-than-human world. (HL) Green.

Fall 2021, ENGL 293A-01: Topics in American Literature: Introduction to Graphic Narratives (3). Prerequisite: Completion of the FDR FW writing requirement. This course briefly explores early works in the graphic novel form before shifting to a central focus on 21st-century publications from a range of presses outside of U.S. mainstream comics. Students also read a range of literary theory on the formal qualities of graphic novels and then apply those theories to the analysis of selected works. (HL) Gavaler.