Advanced Seminars

ENG 380 Poetry and the Natural World

Instructor
K. Gross
CRN
Fall 2022
Days
W 2:00-4:40pm

We’ll be looking at how poets place themselves in the natural world, at how poets imagine or re-envision the world of elemental things and creatures, the weather, the seasons, the cycles of growth and decay, hidden processes of creation and destruction—what poets make of a tree, a snake or butterfly, a singing bird, a mountain, a shoreline, a sunset, a storm. Poets can see nature as a divine artifact, also as a home for human love and need. The natural landscape can be both garden and wilderness, both sacred and profane, both commonplace and haunted, a place of solitude and of stranger company, a forest of symbols, even a living creature in its own right. It can also be the realm of something profoundly alien, secretive, inhuman. Nature can indeed sometimes look supernatural to poets. Especially in the wake of nineteenth-century Romantic poetry, nature starts to be seen as a kind of gift, a source of power and renewal, a space of play. It’s also seen more and more clearly as something that human beings can exploit, and even ruin (at our own cost). Poetry more and more reveals nature as a subject of history, and as something that remembers history. It’s something that we change, and that changes us. It may ask us to imagine it better, more fully. Readings will include the work of Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, John Clare, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, A. R. Ammons, May Swenson, Derek Walcott. W. S. Merwin, and Louise Glück.

ENG 380 Literary Style

Instructor
E. Tawil
CRN
Fall 2022
Days
TR 2:00-3:15pm

This seminar will focus on the fascinating but somewhat murky idea of “style” in literature. Often described as the how rather than the what of writing, the notion of style is an attempt describe how different artists can use the same basic materials (for example, the same lexicon, genre conventions, character types, or basic plot points) and yet put these common elements together in a unique way. This principle of style is easier to recognize than to define. We know when we are in the presence of a distinctive style (think of famous literary stylists like Ernest Hemingway or William Faulkner), but to define it clearly is a different matter. In this class, we will look at a broad range of literary examples (from the Renaissance to the twentieth century), as well as some works of criticism that have attempted to theorize style. This course fulfills the advanced seminar requirement for majors in English, but is open to students across the divisions. 

Utopian and Dystopian Writing

Instructor
Rosemary Kegl
CRN
Spring 2023
Days
M/W 2:00-3:15pm

In this course we discuss the literary qualities and social impulses that characterize utopian and dystopian writing. We focus on utopian and dystopian worlds imagined in British and American prose fiction from the sixteenth through the twenty-first century. We consider, among other topics, how this writing draws on Afrofuturism, journalism, naturalism, realism, romance, satire, science fiction, scientific and political treatises, and travel narratives. We read short stories and longer fiction (in entirety and in excerpt). Our authors include Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Francis Godwin, Margaret Cavendish, Jonathan Swift, Mary Shelley, Samuel Butler, Edward Bellamy, William Morris, William Dean Howells, E.M. Forster, W.E.B Du Bois, Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Nnedi Okorafor, and Ken Liu. You have the option, in your essays, to focus on utopian or dystopian works beyond those on our syllabus. 

 

Comedy in Film and Television

Instructor
Joel Burges
CRN
Spring 2023
Days
T/R 3:25-4:40pm

From rom coms, musical comedies, and sitcoms to tragicomedy, satire, and slapstick, many versions of comedy have made us laugh out loud or smile sardonically from the ancients to the moderns. While this history will have a place in our course, we will primarily investigate comedy in film and television of the 20th and 21st centuries. We will explore critical issues related to comedy, including the function and meaning of laughter and jokes; moments of comic relief; the relationship of comedy to community and crisis; love, sexuality, and romance; the role of the body and whether comedy is a "body genre"; how race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class get messily mediated by comedy; the difference of comedy from other modes such as tragedy, horror, and realism; and the varying tones comedy can have from dark to light, serious to fun, and comforting to disturbing. Preference will be given to English, Digital Media Studies, and Film & Media Studies majors fulfilling a requirement.

 

The Horror Film

Instructor
Jason Middleton
CRN
Spring 2023
Days
Wednesday 4:50-7:30pm

This course examines major critical issues surrounding the horror genre, through close study of Classical Hollywood, post-classical, and international horror films, and readings in critical theory. Issues to be explored include boundary transgression and bodily abjection in the construction of the horror monster; gender, pregnancy, and the monstrous-feminine; social Otherness (race, class, sexuality) as monstrosity; the figure of the serial killer and the shift from classic to modern horror; the grotesque and the blending of comedy and horror in the zombie film. As a research seminar, the course will involve the development of a substantial research project.