ENGL 413 - Senior Research and Writing

Credits: 3
Planned Offering: Fall, Winter

Topics in Winter 2011:

ENGL 413A: Senior Research and Writing: Studying Literature in Action (3). This capstone explores the impact of reading literature and expressive writing using empirical methods, introspection, and traditional literary analysis. Shared theoretical readings augment individual directed readings in poetry, narrative fiction, drama, or children’s literature, depending on the student’s area of interest and expertise. A service-learning experience, involving work with young readers through community schools or libraries, is a possibility. Also discussed are more traditional literary critical options. Students assist Professor Keen in her research on emotional responses to reading. Course meetings are held at Professor Keen’s house on a weekday evening, with dinner being served. Keen. 

ENGL 413B: Senior Research and Writing: Off the Canonical Map in American Literature (3). This capstone course studies American literature’s non-canonical authors whose works bring marginalized lives and issues to center stage. American ethnic writers (Native American, African American, Asian American, Latina/o and Chicana/o, and mixed-blood), those who identify with diverse gender and sexual orientations and/or the working class, and those using experimental fiction/memoir (graphic novels, performance pieces) to tell the American Experience, are our focus. Though this is not a theory course, we discuss key theoretical concepts necessary to the reading and evaluation of the assigned literary texts. We also look into the political, historical, cultural, theoretical, and literary concerns of these writers. As a literature class, we zero in on the styles, themes, modes, writing techniques, and literary devices embedded in the texts, and how these elements relate to and reinforce the identity politics of the texts and authors. Our goal is to see the power of literature to make interventions in critical discourses and to transform the many lives it seeks to represent and inevitably refashion. Possible authors include Leslie Silko, Dorothy Allison, Leslie Feinberg, Sandra Cisneros, Ursula LeGuin, Carla Trujillo, Jeanette Winterson, Craig Womack, Sherman Alexie, Audre Lorde, Louise Erdrich, Alice Walker, Junot Diaz, Tony Kushner, Howard Cruse, Art Spiegelman. Miranda. 

ENGL 413C: Senior Research and Writing: Ritual, Religion, and Drama (3). Is drama inherently ritualistic, even religious? While scholars once speculated that ancient Greek drama evolved out of religious rituals, post-Reformation drama (including Shakespeare’s) often actively worked to minimize its religious content to avoid accusations of idolatry. The role of the body, especially the senses, in dramatic performance (and spectatorship) fosters much of the controversy surrounding its ritual elements; divergent attitudes towards those ritual elements continue even into modern and postmodern drama. The course pairs theoretical readings about ritual, performance, and religion with dramas that interrogate or illustrate various aspects of the relationship among ritual, religion, and drama. Playwrights may include Euripides, Shakespeare, Middleton, Beckett, Pinter, and Soyinka. Pickett.

ENGL 413D: Senior Research and Writing: Ecocriticism (3). In this course, we investigate the relationship between nature and culture through a focus on literary theory. Readings in the history of literary theory lead to discussions of themes such as textual recovery, literary history, genre, cultural geography, material culture, ecofeminism, and environmental justice. We also use an anthology of environmental literature to build our knowledge of primary texts. The possibilities for research projects are numberless, and I try to guide students toward projects that join theoretical concerns with literary texts. We work together as a study group, but each student produces a research paper on a topic of individual interest. Warren.

Topics in Fall 2010:

ENGL 413A: Senior Research and Writing: Literature and Human Rights (3). Contemporary literature is riddled with stories of genocide, war, and the mass migration of peoples across international borders. What can novels, memoirs, and creative non-fiction contribute to our understanding of these and other human rights crises? What ethical and aesthetic challenges inhere in an author’s choice to speak on behalf of individuals, communities, and nations threatened by civil war, revolution, and foreign occupation? And to what standards of truth and art do we, as readers, hold this writing? In considering these questions, we spend the first weeks of this course reading contemporary literary dispatches about such places as Guatemala, China, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Iran, and Guantanamo Bay. Documentaries, visual art, and readings about international human rights policy enrich our classroom discussions. The final weeks of the course are devoted to individual research and writing projects, and students have the choice to expand their inquiries in a longer work of criticism or creative writing (fiction or creative non-fiction). Darznik

ENGL 413B: Senior Research and Writing: Becoming a Metropolis (3). This seminar addresses the literary history of London in the 18th century, a period in which the British capital rapidly grew to become Europe’s largest city, the center of global commerce, and a modern metropolis characterized by extreme wealth and poverty, grandeur and filth, brilliant entertainments and omnipresent dangers. Our attention moves between the mundane and the monumental as we analyze how diverse literary works portray the daily experience of inhabiting and navigating this often-chaotic city of unprecedented size and complexity. What sorts of narrative strategies, verse forms, or figurative language do these texts use to capture the shape, size, and rhythms of the metropolis? What is the relation between the period’s emerging genres (e.g., the novel, the ballad opera, the periodical essay) and the rapidly-changing city in which they are mostly written and published? How do these works imagine London’s (and Londoners’) relation to the rest of the world? Authors likely include Defoe, Gay, Haywood, Addison and Steele, Goldsmith, Johnson, Burney, Blake. Through the case study of 18th-century London, we address several broader questions: what is a city, and what role does literature play in defining it? How do urban geographies, social dynamics, and literary forms interrelate? For their final projects, students choose to continue the focus on 18th-century London or take up these central questions in relation to the literature of another city or period. Braunschneider