Senior and Junior Seminars
This page will be devoted to keeping Lit Majors informed about required courses planned for the coming year, so that you can consider your choices now for Junior and Senior Seminars. Below find listed Junior Seminars (Englit 1900) and Senior Seminars (Englit 1909) proposed for the Fall 2006 and Spring 2007 terms. Please note that these descriptions are provisional and may undergo some changes: they are meant only to give you an idea of who will be teaching what seminars to help you plan your next year.
FALL 2007 – Senior Seminars
Senior Seminar: “Caribbean Literature”
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Professor Shalini Puri
The Caribbean could be said to be the crossroads of the world. With its
diversity of languages, and its population drawn from five continents, the
literature of the Caribbean stands in complex relationships to the
literary traditions of the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia. We will
trace these multiple and mixed literary traditions. For instance, we will
study the relationships between high-culture and popular culture, between
the oral and the written word, between Creole and “Standard English,” and
between musicality and literature. We will explore the wide-ranging ways
in which Caribbean literature and film imagine popular agency in relation
to regionalist, diasporic, mixed-race, armed revolutionary, and feminist
projects.
Senior Seminar: “Tudor Hardtops: Elizabeth I vs. Christopher Marlowe”
Professor Curtis Breight
I’ve always wanted to use the expression “Tudor hardtop.” Despite what SHOWTIME apparently is doing in its depiction of the sexy “Tudors,” omitting of course that old miser Henry VII (dubious founder of the line), for the common people the age of the Tudors was a drag, in religion, and by the time their dynasty was ending, English wages were at their lowest point in history. This irritates people, to say the least, and worries them a lot, to say the most, since a lot of people at this time thought they had immortal souls requiring the correct shepherding on earth.
In this course we’ll immerse ourselves in the recently collected writings of Elizabeth I, the many historical films about her reign (and about her contemporaries), the plays of Marlowe, and the many film adaptations related to his works. We’ll also spend some time on the many novels published on Elizabeth and Marlowe respectively, Elizabethan entertainments, biographies of Elizabeth and Marlowe, the visual arts, and selections from the best available historiography. Elizabeth has been mythologized as The Virgin Queen. Marlowe has been demonized as an enemy of the state. Do we care about digging for truths, and are they available, and if they were, would they mean anything in this era of ultimate celebrity?
SPRING 2008 – Senior Seminars
Senior Seminar: "Telling the Truth in the Middle Ages"
- Professor Hannah Johnson
If a scribe adapts a manuscript in copying it, has he created a forgery? When medieval authors incorporate legends into their accounts of historical events, are they less "truthful" because they have applied a different cultural standard of fact to their work? How did medieval authors and audiences evaluate the claims of miraculous interventions attributed to saints? Together we will consider the line between truth and fiction in the Middle Ages, and think about how medieval people confronted problems of evidence and interpretation. We will ask how narratives may operate as documents of persuasion that seek to convince us of the reliability of their claims. And as we investigate the capacious category of "nonfiction" in the Middle Ages, we will also explore dilemmas presented by these sources for modern readers, such as the difficulty of evaluating medieval truth claims, deciding between genuine documents and forgeries, and interpreting texts that are mediated by complex cultural assumptions about gender, sanctity, and the purposes of history. From the account of an eleventh-century monk who ‘invented’ his own apostle to Sir John Mandeville’s exotic tales of adventure in the east, we will ask what it meant to tell the truth in medieval culture.
Senior Seminar: “Women and Literacy”
- Professor Jean Ferguson Carr
This seminar explores how women’s literacy is constructed, shaped by
schooling and criticism, and framed in relationship to readers’ desires
and expectations. We will consider how women writers of particular
cultural moments negotiated the terms of their reading, writing, speaking,
publication, and reception. We will focus on three such negotiated
moments, which allow us to explore particular tensions about women’s
literacy: the notable rise in female readership and authorship in the U.S.
in the early 19th-century, the entry of women in U.S. colleges and
academies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the political and
critical challenge shaped by feminist projects of the 1960s and 70s. We
will read materials written by women, critical accounts of women's writing
and education, as well as primary materials prepared to advis and educate
women. Students will develop a cultural and historical project of their
own, using various kinds of literacy materials to explore women’s
literacy, language, education, and reception.
Senior Seminar: “Oscar Wilde and the 1890's”
- Professor Philip E. Smith
This seminar invites study of the major works of Oscar Wilde--his poetry, criticism, plays, and novel--in the context of late 19th-century intellectual controversies such as those over gender roles, evolutionary explanations for the role of culture, and the issues of “decadence” in the arts and “degeneration” among artists. In addition to Wilde’s writing and a biography of Wilde, we will read texts by European and Anglophone writers, such as Nietzsche, Ibsen, and several of the New Women. Wilde's writing will be considered in relation to literary and artistic movements such as aestheticism and decadence as well as in relation to 19th-century social, political, philosophical, and scientific discourses. Through its focus on a wide range of readings and genres, the seminar should offer English majors a wide range of opportunities to test critical methods and theoretical models for reading and interpretation. Since this is a seminar, students will be expected to make class presentations about texts under discussion and about research materials. The major written work of the course will be a long critical essay based on research, which will also be presented in abbreviated form as a talk to the seminar.
Senior Seminar: “Lyrical Ballads and Literary Studies”
- Professor Don Bialostosky
Lyrical Ballads (1798, 1800, 1802, 1805) was controversial even between its collaborating contributors, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and it has remained a site of critical controversy for two centuries. Touted as a revolutionary text that inaugurated British Romanticism and denigrated as a failed experiment, it will provide our seminar with opportunities to examine its poems and its preface in light of the critical debates they have occasioned and sustained. We'll consider whether or in what sense Lyrical Ballads is "romantic" or revolutionary at all, what kind of an "experiment" it was and on what the experiment was conducted. We'll examine the controversies over how to read Wordsworth's Preface and his poems, giving special attention to Coleridge's influential account of them in Biographia Literaria. We'll also consider how a number of schools of literary history and criticism have taken up the argument between Wordsworth and Coleridge and redescribed their poems.
Students will closely read both primary and secondary works and learn to find their way among the critics and criticism. They will write analyses of poems and critical articles, a research paper on the history of criticism of a poem or a problem associated with Lyrical Ballads, and an intervention into a critical debate connected with the collection. These latter two may be part of the same longer project.
FALL 2007 – Junior Seminars
Junior Seminar: “Literature and History”
- Professor. Nancy Glazener
It's quite common to assume that literary works are somehow shaped by history, but the relationship between literature and history is a rich and fascinating problem that can be explored in many ways. After all, history does not really come packaged as a stable and self-explanatory "context." Ways of living, working, and thinking and particular forms of power, desire, and knowledge can all be understood as historical. History affects particular authors who write, particular readers who read, genres and traditions that emerge and come to be valued, and all the institutions involved when texts are circulated, lost, revived, praised, blamed, valued, or dismissed. In order to develop a shared body of expertise around a key text, the course will be organized around an investigation into the historicity of Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Hamlet has been the centerpiece of a number of bold theories by scholars of the English Renaissance (including biographical speculations about Shakespeare's family life and religiosity and cultural theories about the onset of modern forms of subjectivity and individualism). However, the character of Hamlet was also an object of obsessive fascination and complex identification for many 18th- and 19th-century writers in Great Britain and the United States. William Godwin, George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans), Herman Melville, Sarah Piatt, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge are only a few of these later writers who wrote about Hamlet, either by reflecting on the play in passionate critical works or by reworking scenes, characters, and problems from Hamlet in their own novels and poems. Moreover, because Hamlet investigated a crime committed by a reigning king, Hamlet set important precedents for later writers of detective fiction and novels about political radicalism. Hamlet will be the centerpiece of the course, but a variety of other literary and conceptual texts will contribute to our work.
Junior Seminar: “Word & Image”
- Professor Jennifer Waldron
What are the differences between reading words and "reading" images? Can
skills learned in analyzing literary texts be transferred to interpreting
other contemporary media, such as TV, movies, or advertisements? How does
the rise in digitization of both words and images change our understanding
of their oppositions and complicities? Addressing a wide variety of media,
this course will examine competitions between word and image at various
historical moments as well as their mutual dependence. Some of the forms
we will discuss are Shakespearean drama, concrete poetry, Romantic poetry,
graphic novels, advertising, and new media art.
Junior Seminar: “The Work of Interpretation”
Professor Mariolina Salvatori
There is, of course, a common fantasy of the independent, the natural reader, of men and women quite alone with the text, making sense of it by their own unaided efforts, uncontaminated by givens and presuppositions, by prejudices and doctrines, especially not anything that might be called theory, or (especially) Theory. This dream fires many a whinge against current literary education. But no one ever did read de novo, raw, naturally; understanding never came that easily.-- Valentine Cunningham, READING after THEORY.
Whether you are conscious of it or not, any time you construe an argument as to what a particular writer really intended to say; any time you trace the unfolding of a text's meaning through its deployment of certain literary techniques; or any time you affirm the importance of issues like race, class, or gender in a literary text, you are functioning as a literary critic and closet theorist. Although they might seem obvious and natural, especially to educated readers like yourselves, your interpretations, like those of established critics, are inevitably shaped by specific theoretical assumptions about what calls for, and constitutes, "interpretation." It is those assumptions, and the work they make possible, that will interest us this semester.
SPRING 2008 – Junior Seminars
Junior Seminar: “Macbeth: Evaluations and Adaptations”
- Professor Susan Harris Smith
"Macbeth: Evaluations and Adaptations" will explore Shakespeare's Macbeth as a ubiquitous and powerful literary and cultural phenomenon. In particular the course will focus on the ways the play has been of enduring interest to a wide range of critics and theorists, positioned for students in textbook introductions and guides, and adapted by a variety of playwrights and filmmakers from William Davenant in the seventeenth century to Richard Schechner in the twentieth century. Though we will read a variety of critics from A.C. Bradley, Cleanth Brooks, and L.C. Knights to Coppelia Kahn, Alan Sinfield, and Richard Halpern, this is not a course on Macbeth as much as it is about the myriad Macbeths produced by theorists, playwrights, and filmmakers: the satiric vehicle for Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi (1896) and Barbara Garson's Macbird! (1965), the embodiment of early modern ideas of the "primitive" in Orson Welles's "Voodoo" Macbeth of 1936, the "contemporary" Macbeth of Charles Marowitz, and the intercultural Macbeths of Eugene Ionesco's Macbett (1972) and Heiner Muller's Macbeth (1972), the black Macbeths of the Caribbean-American Theatre and African adaptations, and film versions (such as Akira Kurasawa's Throne of Blood, Roman Polanski's Macbeth, Joe Macbeth and Scotland, Pa.).
Junior Seminar: “Literature and Instruction”
- Professor Stephen Carr
An exploration of the uses, goals, and consequences of literary study. We will read across a wide range of literary texts, instructional materials, polemical essays, critical debates, and theoretical manifestos written from the eighteenth century to the present moment.
Junior Seminar: “Memoir and Fiction”
- Professor Jim Seitz
This course will examine some of the issues that the tenuous boundary between memoir and fiction raises for writers, readers, and the culture at large. Many writers of memoir openly admit that their autobiographical texts incorporate a good deal of fiction, while many writers of fiction disclose that they base characters and events in their stories on autobiographical experience. One of the key questions that arises as a result of these practices is whether they make any difference: does it matter that a memoir makes use of fiction or that a novel is based on the author’s life? Why or why not? What are the consequences for either genre if the border between memoir and fiction dissolves? Whether it’s the rise of reality TV, the appearance of blockbuster documentaries, the necessity of street credentials for rap musicians, or the ubiquity of Internet pages that digitally represent the lives of ordinary citizens, American culture is clearly fascinated by “real life”—whatever that means. In this course, we’ll explore some of these phenomena in our study of the relationship between art and truth.
