ENGL 299 - Seminar for Prospective Majors

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

Topics for Fall 2011:

ENGL 299-01: Seminar for Prospective Majors: Contemporary American Creative Non-Fiction (3). This course explores creative non-fiction in contemporary American literature. We read work by such essayists and memoirists as Mary Karr, Tobias Wolff, and David Sedaris. We also read literary criticism about memoir and other forms of life writing and reflect on the cultural forces that have made personal narratives such a phenomenal force in today’s literary landscape. As students work toward writing a longer research paper, they gain skills and confidence in researching topics in English. (HL) Crowley

ENGL 299-02: Seminar for Prospective Majors: Charles Dickens and His Circle (3). Popular novelist, reforming crusader, amateur actor, and professional journalist, Charles Dickens wore many masks. He could be hilarious, sentimental, or scathing, a moralist, and a hypocrite. He rivals Shakespeare in his creation of iconic fictional characters. In his work with the journal Household Words and All the Year Round, he brought his contemporaries to wide audiences. In this course we read fiction by members of his circle (Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell) as well as several short stories and long novels by Dickens himself. Independent research projects culminate in seminar papers, with an emphasis on the writing process. (HL) Keen

Topics for Winter 2012: 

ENGL 299-01: Seminar for Prospective Majors: Bright-harnessed Angels: Writers and Religion in 17th-Century England (3). In one of his earliest poems, John Milton described powerful, harnessed angels kneeling in service to a swaddled babe who, as an infant, could obliterate a “damned crew” of mythic gods. For Milton and his contemporaries, religion itself was that bright-harnessed angel that livened and threatened to overtake a literary work as well as a literary life. We study three major writers whose lives and works existed at the center of literary innovation partly because of the religious choices they made. The poet John Donne, whose own brother died in prison from torture for his Catholic belief, converted to Protestantism and attained notoriety for his sermons at court. Famous as a risk-taker in love and politics, Donne did not hold back in his poetry: he infused religious sonnets with erotic longing and famously questioned God’s providence. His contemporary, Elizabeth Cary, dared to write plays and translate Catholic writing under a Protestant regime. After she converted to Catholicism publicly, she spent her life trying to gain the fortune that was originally due to her, and ordered by the King, from her Protestant husband. She appeared before Star Chamber for smuggling her children out of the country to be educated in Catholic France. Serving the Puritan government at the same time that one of Cary’s daughters, an exiled nun, wrote her mother’s life, John Milton served as secretary to Protector Cromwell and had already established a reputation as an exceptional poet. Milton’s famous epic, Paradise Lost, was penned during and after the causes to which he dedicated his life – republicanism and Puritanism, lost the reins of power to the English state. (HL) Gertz 

ENGL 299-02: Seminar for Prospective Majors: “So Black and Blue”: Ralph Ellison and the Civil Rights Movement (3). In 1952, Ralph Ellison published his first novel, Invisible Man, which promptly won the National Book Award (the first time an African-American writer would receive this award) and established itself as an American classic – perhaps even the Great American Novel. From the early 1950s until his death in 1994, Ellison continued to write fiction, concentrating particularly on his ongoing, never-completed saga of America, eventually published posthumously in 2009 as Three Days Before the Shooting… Though Ellison had come to be regarded as a failed second novelist, the publication of this book reveals the extent and depth of his second novel project, the central core of which deserves recognition as some of the finest visionary fiction ever written by an American. Yet Ellison often occupied a contested ground among the Black Nationalists and stood uneasily within the Civil Rights movement. In this seminar, we examine Ellison’s overall achievement in both fiction and the essay, in the context of the historical framework of the Civil Rights movement from the early 1950s through to the end of Ellison’s life in 1994. (HL) Conner 

ENGL 299-03: Seminar for Prospective Majors: African-American Poetry: Performing Blackness (3). Poetry is an oral and a visual art, and African-American poets have engaged that dichotomy in particularly interesting ways – producing poetry for the page that responds to a lively vernacular culture and musical innovations from jazz to hip-hop. Readings for this class focus on Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks but include poetry and poetics from the 19th century through Spoken Word. Students learn how to frame, research, construct, and revise a long essay addressing some of this course’s core concerns: race, identity, and lyric poetry. (HL) Wheeler