Fall 2024 Seminars
ENGLIT 1900: Project Seminar
Shaun Myers, We 6:00 – 8:30
Description coming soon!
ENGLIT 1900: Project Seminar
Jeff Aziz, TuTh 4 – 5:15
Description coming soon!
ENGLIT 1910: Senior Seminar, “Global Children’s Literature”
Lidong Xiang, We 6 – 8:30 p.m.
This course focuses on global children’s literature and trends and sociopolitical issues that surround childhood(s). We will explore the global literature that is available in the United States as well as the international literature published in different parts of the world for children and adolescents. We will discuss ways to integrate global literature to build intercultural understandings and global perspectives. To develop a critical understanding of representations of children’s experiences that are not only contemporary phenomena but have occurred historically, we will attend to conceptual complexities of what is “global” and why “childhoods” and how they are interconnected. Examining literature covering the lives of children across regions and contexts, we will reflect on historical and contemporary practices affecting children and their response toward these interventions.
Within this course, our goal is to form a community of readers in which diverse, even opposing, readings of books are welcomed. Our focus is on our response to books through inquiring into our differing understandings including perspectives of children and childhood that are socially and culturally constructed. Your participation in discussions and engagements is crucial to the success of the course.
ENGLIT 1910: Senior Seminar, “Discovering the English Country House”
John Twyning, TuTh 2:30- 3:45
The English Country House is a complex artifact of English culture including literature, architecture, and landscape. It is unique and ever changing and has had an extraordinary impact on the construction of English ideology. From its emergence in the late Middle Ages to the present, from Wordsworth’s poem on Tintern Abbey to Downtown Abbey, it has shaped English consciousness, politics, and what it means to be English. This course will examine various examples of the country house in literature in the context of cultural, architectural, religious, and secular histories to develop an understanding of the plasticity and the durability of this real and imaginary edifice of English culture. We will ask questions about the way the idea of the country house organizes life, divisions of labor, social hierarchies, and what kinds of identities do and do not get included in this vision of England. We will look at texts from a long span of history, including 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century poetry; 19th- and 20th-century fiction; landscape painting and architecture; and some films and TV series that revive interest in the country house.