ENGL 380 - Advanced Seminar

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

Topic for Spring 2012:

ENGL 380-01: Advanced Seminar: Whales, Whaling, and Melville’s Moby-Dick (4). Prerequisite: Junior or senior majors, or sophomores with ENGL 299. This course focuses on Herman Melville’s great novel, Moby-Dick (1851), and investigates the cultural and critical contexts surrounding the novel. We learn about the natural history of whales, the cultural history of whaling, and the literary history of the novel. As part of our work, we travel together to Mystic, Connecticut, for a five-day research visit to Mystic Seaport, the Museum of America and the Sea. Among the many resources are the Charles W. Morgan, a restored 1841 whaling ship; a collection of other tall ships at the waterfront; a restored nineteenth-century seaport village along the lines of Williamsburg or the American Frontier Museum; a preservation shipyard; an art gallery and extensive research collection; the Munson Institute of Maritime Studies, whose faculty includes Dr. Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, Associate Professor at University of Connecticut and co-editor of Herman Melville’s Whaling Years. The course requirements include a reading journal, a short paper, an oral presentation, and a longer research paper. (HL) Warren.

Topics for Winter 2012:

ENGL 380-01: Advanced Seminar: 21st Century Poetry: Here, Nowhere (3). Literature is often deeply informed by landscape, human community, and geographical boundaries. In this class, we focus on contemporary poetry about endangered, damaged, or imagined locations, beginning with the Gulf Coast after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. We also consider Pacific writing as a way of imagining community across great distances and cultural differences. (HL) Wheeler

ENGL 380-02: Advanced Seminar: Cowboys? And Indians? (3). How did America become known as the land of Cowboys and Indians? How did these two groups become intertwined as stereotypes recognized the world over and retold countless times in the world’s most famous genre, the Western? We start with some stories of Indians, studying how they were depicted in early American literature and history, leading up to Indian removal to the West, Custer’s Last Stand, and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. We then turn to the rise of the Western itself, studying it as a story of national origins, psychology, policy, and destiny focused in the figure of the cowboy. We finally trace some competing versions of cowboy stories and Indian stories told since then as America changes and develops, through fiction, poetry, drama, and film by many famous writers and moviemakers including Indians. What are the stakes for this story now, which just will not die, but keeps on going in movies like No Country for Old Men and True Grit? (HL) Smout

ENGL 380-03: Advanced Seminar: American Storytelling: Made in the U.S.A. (3). We start by asking these questions: What is “American” storytelling? What stories do Americans tell? Is there one American story? How do ethnicity and gender affect stories told about our lives in the United States? What do they allow? What do they not allow? What do they make possible? What do they disrupt? How are ethnic literatures different from canonical American Literatures? How are ethnic literatures important to the overall history of the United States? Why are these stories important for you? This course focuses on ethnic “minority” literature (material written by men and women of non-dominant cultures in the U.S.), moving it from the edges (or margins) of your world into the center. We focus on four groups: African American, Native American, Mexican American, and Japanese American. We study stories, poems, narratives, autobiographies, music and visual art from these communities. We complicate the issue of labels by looking also at gender relationships and histories within these communities, using a relatively small handful of texts. On your own, you study one author from one of these communities not on our syllabus, in preparation for a small group presentation and your final research essay. (HL) Miranda