ENGL 295 - Spring-Term Seminar in Literary Studies

FDR: HL
Credits: 4
Planned Offering: Spring

Spring 2013 topics:

ENGL 295-01: Spring-Term Seminar in Literary Studies: The American Hero in Fiction and Film (4). Prerequisite: Completion of FDR FW requirement.  What is a Hero? And what does it mean to be a specifically American Hero? American history and culture is richly populated with heroic figures, ranging from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln, from Mickey Mantle to Eleanor Roosevelt, from Rosa Parks to John F. Kennedy. In American literature, we find a similar abundance of heroic figures, exhibiting the full complexity of what it means to be a hero. In this course, we examine four iconic representations of American Heroes in literature: Twain’s boy-hero, Huckleberry Finn; Fitzgerald’s romantic quester, Jay Gatsby; Hurston’s ground-breaking presentation of the liberated woman in Janie; and Charles Johnson’s fictionalization of Martin Luther King Jr. in his recent novel, Dreamer.  We also examine four renowned presentations of the American hero in film: The Natural; The Godfather, parts 1 and 2; The Color Purple; and Malcolm X. Finally, we engage several non-fiction works to help us grasp the complexity of the American Hero. (HL) Conner.

ENGL 295-02: Spring-Term Seminar in Literary Studies: The Western Novel: On the Page and On the Screen (4). Prerequisite: Completion of FDR FW requirement. Students read novels view films about the American West: Wister’s The Virginian, Clark’s The Ox-Bow Incident, Leonard’s Hombre, Portis’s True Grit, Hansen’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Bob Ford, McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, and Parker’s Appaloosa. We begin with American westward expansion and early ”frontier” texts (Cooper, Sedgwick, Crane, Twain, Harte, Grey). Discussion topics include romance and reality, convention and invention/type and character, the allure and labor of the margin, landscape/ inscape/escape, brotherhood of the saddle, hero and antihero, morality and pattern, the American Adam, mythmaking and breaking, ritual and law, justice and expediency. (HL) Smith.

ENGL 295-03: Spring-Term Seminar in Literary Studies: Hitchcock (4). Prerequisite: Completion of FDR FW requirement. An intensive survey of the films of Alfred Hitchcock: it covers most of his major and several of his less well-known films. It supplements that central work by introducing students to several approaches to film analysis that are particularly appropriate for studying Hitchcock. These include biographical interpretation (Spoto’s dark thesis), auteur- and genre-based interpretation (Truffaut), psychological analyses (Rank and Freud), and dominant-form theory (hands-on study of one novel to film adaptation). (HL) Adams.