Please feel free to direct your students to these Fall ‘15 English courses with plenty of open seats. Many count toward gen ed requirements:
ENGL 213: Modernist Lit and Culture
11-12:15 T/R
Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement.
Literature and the Arts course and Western Compartv Cult course
This course will examine one of the most provocative, experimental, and exciting periods in literary history. The early decades of the twentieth century saw rapid technological innovation, global political upheaval, radical transformations in gender roles, and the traumas of two world wars. The literature and art of the period captured these turbulent cultural experiences through extreme formal experimentation. This course will survey the key works that defined the modernist and avant-garde movements; we will examine novels, poetry, film, and manifestos by Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, Charlie Chaplain, Samuel Beckett, and others.
ENGL 241: Beginnings of Modern Poetry
2-3:15 T/R
Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement.
Western Compartv Cult course
An inquiry into some of the more complex and innovative poetry written in English. Students will read poets such as Frost, Robinson, Sandburg, Lindsay, Hardy, Hopkins, Housman, Yeats, Lawrence, the Imagists, and the early Pound and Eliot.
ENGL 245: The Short Story
11-11:50 MWF
OR
11-12:15 T/R
Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement.
Literature and the Arts course
A wide-ranging introduction to shorter works of fiction, this course will cover some influential texts from the nineteenth century, as well as a generous selection of stories from the turn of the twentieth century and modernism, but we will spend at least half the semester studying innovative and diverse works produced in the last five decades, often by writers with a complicated or frankly oppositional relationship to these canonical traditions. Along the way, we will consider the role of historical and cultural context in shaping our interpretations of these literary texts, and we will put into practice some key terms drawn from narratology and various schools of critical theory.
ENGL 250: The American Novel to 1914
2-3:15 M/W
Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement.
Literature and the Arts course and Western Compartv Cult course
Critical study of selected American novels from the late eighteenth century to 1914.
ENGL 251: The American Novel Since 1914
12:30-1:45 T/R
Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement.
Literature and the Arts course and Western Compartv Cult course
In this course we will read seven American novels published after 1914 at critical points in US history. You will gain an understanding not only of individual works but also of literary modernism, realism, and postmodernism. Instead of treating these generic categories as universal and fixed, we will track the way they change in various historical contexts. How do certain social issues shape the defining conventions of a modernist and postmodernist novel? How does modernist and postmodernist novelistic practice lay bare the false and true promises of the American dream, the unequal distribution of wealth, the formation of the working and middle-class family, and the connection of national identity to the evolution US capitalism? As you answer these questions, you will become skilled at examining the shifting intersections of race, class, and gender.
ENGL 253: Literature and New Media
11-12:15 T/R
Literature and New Media: What does it mean to study literature at the start of the 21c? Are print and its major aesthetic forms archaic or simply mutating? What’s at stake in the shift from analog to digital representation? What was a reader and what will reading be in twenty or a hundred years? To get at these questions, we will work with conventional literary forms (like poems and novels) and consider the material formats in which these genres have historically been consumed (the codex book, the newspaper, but also, now, the e-reader, the tablet, the phone, and the laptop). But we will also look at photographs, watch movies, play video games, use apps, and navigate webpages. The mode and moment in which a text is produced and consumed will, in this way, become an important part of how we think about what literature was, is, and might be in our contemporary context. Note: this semester’s version of the course will focus on the theme of the technological monstrous, so get ready to sleep with the lights on. Some major texts we are likely to consider include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Shelley Jackson’s electronic hypertext Patchwork Girl, Robert Kirkman’s Walking Dead comics, videogames like The Last of Us, Alien: Isolation, and Evolve, and, finally, Mark Danielewski’s epic postmodern romp House of Leaves.
ENGL 280: Women Writers
12-12:50 MWF
Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement.
Early Modern Women Writers in England (Sixteenth-Seventeenth Centuries) This course will serve as an introduction to early modern women?s writing from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth century. We will sample a variety of literature written by women, focusing both on close textual analysis and cultural context. The course will begin with a very brief introduction to the position of women in this period, and then move quickly on to detailed readings of primary texts. We will trace the dominant themes, identities, and forms of these works, focusing in particular on how women authors repeat, revise or rebel against the gender norms and societal expectations of their day. Readings will probably include poetry by Elizabeth I and Mary Wroth, drama by Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn, and an early novel by Eliza Haywood.
ENGL 285: Postcolonial Lit in English
2-3:15 T/R
Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement.
Literature and the Arts course and Non-Western Cultures course
Examination of selected postcolonial literature, theory, and film as texts that “write back” to dominant European representations of power, identity, gender and the Other. Postcolonial writers, critics and filmmakers studied may include Franz Fanon, Edward Said, Aime Cesaire, Ousmane Sembene, Chinua Achebe, Michelle Cliff, Mahesweta Devi, Buchi Emecheta, Derek Walcott and Marlene Nourbese-Philip.
ENGL 441: British Lit 1900-1930
2-3:15 T/R
Prerequisite: One year of college literature or consent of instructor.
The literature of the first three decades of the twentieth century was marked by the trauma of a world war, new media technologies, a collapsing British empire, and shifting gender roles. This course will explore the ways that literature provoked and was transformed by these cultural forces. This is the era made famous by Downton Abbey, and while we will read fiction of the English manor, we will also examine experiments in stream of consciousness, imagist poetry, avant-garde manifestos, and radio dramas. This course will survey key works by Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Mina Loy, T.S. Eliot, Charlie Chaplin, and Samuel Beckett that defined ?modernism? as well as philosophical and cultural theories that have attempted to answer questions of how Britain became modern and what modern meant.
ENGL 455: Major Authors – Herman Melville and Frederick Douglass
11-11:50 MWF
Prerequisite: One year of college literature or consent of instructor.
Douglass Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville do not actually have a lot in common but what they do have in common is not only exciting and interesting, it is profound. Douglass’ writings, from newspaper articles to autobiographies, are fiercely anti-slavery. Herman Melville’s fiction and letters (including Moby-Dick), while certainly not abolitionist, reflect his deep thinking about regional and national conflicts over slavery and imperialism. Both men felt that there was an overall crisis of being in the nineteenth-century world that stemmed from rapidly changing notions of power/knowledge, self-reflection, as well as what it meant for someone to practice moral and spiritual commitments. We will study these legendary American figures through their poetry, prose, and other letters to analyze how they engaged and contested the historical moment that created them.
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Kristine McCoskey, Ed M
Academic Advisor
Department of English
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign