ENGL 299 - Seminar for Prospective Majors

FDR: HL
Credits: 3
Planned Offering: Fall, Winter

Topics for Winter 2011:

ENGL 299A: Seminar for Prospective Majors: Dream Visions (3). A study of the major visionary narratives of the later Middle Ages, composed by the period’s most celebrated poets: Dante, Chaucer, Langland, and Jean de Meun (author of the influential Roman de la rose). In this popular poetic mode, the narrator customarily falls asleep and then imagines strange encounters in other worlds which he then relates upon awakening. Our study of the genre commences with its origins in Plato and Cicero before transitioning to some of the medieval period’s most celebrated poems and the social, literary, and religious concerns that they foreground. In the course of exploring these poems, we also familiarize ourselves with scholarship on dream allegories and medieval theories of dreaming. There is some work with the Middle English language, though no prior exposure is necessary. Ultimately the course aims to develop students’ research skills and guide them through the process of planning and writing a literary research paper. (HL) Jirsa. 

ENGL 299B: Seminar for Prospective Majors: The Poetics of Telepathy and the Victorian Afterlife (3). In this class we study the late-Victorian intersection of poetry, early psychological theories of consciousness, and the search for scientific evidence of telepathy and “life after death.” Among the poets who offered their own complex theories of the human mind and communication between minds (even dead ones), we examine William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, and others. We also read works by innovative early psychologists (such as William James) and documents from the Society of Psychical Research, founded in 1882 to study claims of apparitions, “thought-transference,” and other phenomena associated with séances. The class’ working premise is that these three approaches to the human mind—poetry, psychology, and “ghost hunting,” for lack of a pithier term—frequently intersect in Victorian texts. As a gateway to the major, this seminar is designed to train students in the reading, writing, and research skills necessary for English majors; to this end, students engage with critical and theoretical readings to develop a sophisticated approach to literary scholarship, and each student develops a major seminar paper on a topic relevant to the course. (HL) Matthews.

Topics for Fall 2010:

ENGL 299A: Seminar for Prospective Majors: Becoming Jane (3). This course examines Jane Austen’s early novels in the context of other writers who influenced her development. We sample large excerpts from Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel, Pamela, before examining Austen’s use of the epistolary form in Lady Susan. Next, we read parts of Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho to appreciate Austen’s comic use of that novel in Northanger Abbey. Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling shows the culture of sensibility behind Sense and Sensibility, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman outlines ideas about women’s education that Austen explores in Pride and Prejudice. The course ends by jumping forward to Austen’s last completed novel, Persuasion, to conclude an ongoing discussion of the influence of Romanticism on her work. The final goal is a 12-page research paper that combines critical sources with readings of Austen and one of her precursors. (HL) Brodie

ENGL 299B: Seminar for Prospective Majors: Bloomsbury (3). A study of early 20th-century Modernism with particular attention to its contentious relation to 19th-century Victorian culture through a focus upon the colorful group of novelists, essayists, poets, critics, historians, painters, and economists known as Bloomsbury. This course further concentrates on two of Bloomsbury’s most prominent literary members—Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey—but attends to the wide range of talent within which they worked from Woolf’s husband, the critic and publisher Leonard, to Strachey’s brother, the pioneering Freudian psychoanalyst James, to John Maynard Keynes, the leading economist of the 20th century. (HL) Adams