ENGL 299 - Seminar for Prospective Majors

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

Winter 2013 topics:

ENGL 299-01: Seminar for Prospective Majors: Ritual, Religion, and Drama in Early Modern England (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. Why did some Protestant reformers so object to the theater? 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 centers on plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, putting them in the context of the historical debates about religion and theater in Shakespeare’s day. We pair the plays with theoretical readings about ritual, performance, and religion, and take a brief look at the classical origins and the postmodern afterlives of these debates. (HL) Pickett.

ENGL 299-02: Seminar for Prospective Majors: Henry David Thoreau and American Transcendentalism (3). This course focuses on the writings of Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), reading them in relation to other major figures of American Transcendentalism. During Thoreau’s short lifetime, New England culture was the site of far-reaching and profound social, political, scientific, and literary innovations. We combine close attention to works like Walden and The Maine Woods with research into the lyceum lecture series, anti-slavery movements, communitarian experiments, natural history and travel narratives, and the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. (HL) Warren.

Fall 2012 topics:

ENGL 299-01: Seminar for Prospective Majors: American Creative Nonfiction (3). This course explores creative nonfiction in contemporary American literature. We read such memoirists and essayists as Mary Karr, Tobias Wolff, and David Sedaris. We also read literary criticism about life writing and reflect on the cultural forces that have made creative nonfiction such a force in the contemporary literary landscape. As students work toward writing a longer research paper, they gain skills and confidence in researching topics in English. (HL) Darznik.

ENGL 299-02: Seminar for Prospective Majors: Stuck on the Dixie Express: William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor (3). If you ask the world what they know about the American South, they first mention Gone with the Wind. If you press them further for the South’s greatest writers, they almost all mention Faulkner and O’Connor. In this course we study these two writers, talking about the fascinating picture of the South they have conveyed to the world and all the problems this picture has caused. Is the South a Gothic land of dilapidated old mansions, freaks, murders, rapes, incest, and mental torture destroyed by moral evils, or a glorious land of mint juleps, learning, culture, civility, and honor that we prefer to reenact at Washington and Lee? Why did Faulkner and O’Conner tell their gruesome stories? What have we who live in the South and love it gained and lost because of their amazing literary power? And how the heck do Southern readers and writers get rid of these stereotypes now and move on, so everyone is not stuck forever on this version of the Dixie Express, but can tell other stories that paint the South in a more positive and helpful light? (HL) Smout.