ENGL 380 - Advanced Seminar

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

Topic for Spring 2011:

ENGL 380: Spring Term Seminar in Literary Studies: Gravity’s Rainbow (4). Prerequisite: Completion of FW composition requirement. An in-depth exploration of the preeminent example of literary postmodernism, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, a critically acclaimed cult classic that combines the plot of a psychedelic spy thriller with the stylistic experimentation of James Joyce. Pynchon’s classic meditation on paranoia has fascinated readers every bit as much as its author’s well-known reclusiveness. Encyclopedic in scope, this story of the closing months of World War II ranges from the sublime to the absurd, exploring rocketry, sexual fetishism, free will, organic chemistry, the beginnings of the 1960s counterculture, and much more. Students examine the novel from a variety of perspectives: biographical, literary, and cultural as well as scientific and economic. Guest speakers shed light on some of the many areas of knowledge the novel explores (behavioral psychology, the Holocaust, the occult, Gödel’s theorem, sadomasochism … ). We also consider related texts by Pynchon and works by several of the figures that influenced him. Students produce analytical and creative multimedia responses, present research to the class, and lead discussion on selected topics. The course includes a day trip to Washington, DC. (HL) Crowley.

Topics for Winter 2011:

ENGL 380A: Advanced Seminar: Chicana/o Literature (3). Chicana/o or Mexican-American writing includes those works in which a writer’s sense of ethnic identity (chicanismo) animates his or her work manifestly and fundamentally, often through the presentation of Chicano characters, cultural situations, and patterns of speech. This course explores a broad spectrum of the forms and genres of Chicana/o literature produced over the last 30 years, including the political treatise, novel, short story, and poem. Readings, videos and guest speakers discuss the historical and literary contexts of Chicana/o literature, bringing to light the multiple intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality. The scope of the course covers the foundational texts of Chicana/o literature beginning with Movement-inspired concepts and moving through a sampling of the new terrain being explored by feminists, cultural critics, and queer writers at the beginning of the 21st century. Typical authors featured include Rivera, Rodriguez, Cisneros, Anzaldua, Trujillo, Anaya, Viramontes. (HL) Miranda. 

ENGL 380B: Advanced Seminar: Travel and Adventure in the Middle Ages (3). Although moderns think of medieval people as tied to the land or shut inside walled towns, people of all classes, male and female, travelled, sometimes extensively, both in the West and in the Islamic world. This seminar explores the medieval literature of travel and adventure: reasons for travelling, the journey, the unexpected, challenges and tests, descriptions of divergent cultural practices, life-changing effects. Major types: chivalric adventure (Sir Thomas Malory’s Book of Gareth and Book of Sir Tristram), exile and restoration (Aladdin, Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale), trade on land and sea (Sinbad stories from The Arabian Nights, Boccaccio’s Decameron), entry into the realm of Fairie and the discovery of love (The Lais of Marie de France, Sir Orfeo, The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale), pilgrimage and biography (The Book of Margery Kempe), journeys in the afterlife (Dante’s Purgatory). (HL) Craun. 

ENGL 380C: Advanced Seminar: Southern Fiction Then and Now (3). In this class, we read multiple works by four leading fiction writers to study changes in the American South and its literary achievements from the Southern Renaissance to the present day. The authors are William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Cormac McCarthy, and Lee Smith. Their work allows us to focus on such topics as race, class, gender, family, honor, violence, and history. We ask if the South can or should remain a distinctive region and life experience in the global village and the post-modern world. (HL) Smout.