Please feel free to share the following sections of ENGL 300 (Writing About Lit Text & Culture) with your students in need of an advanced comp course, advanced hours, or simply hours toward graduation; please note that each section has a different topic. We have now lifted the major restriction for each of these sections only (we will NOT be lifting the major restriction for Section X, Novels on Film, of ENGL 300):
ENGL 300 – Section C; Topic: America Re-Written
MWF 10-10:50
Advanced Composition Course
America Re-Written: How American Literature Made Citizens Of All Of Us
American literary writers in the 19th century are political; at least that’s what many critics have said. Walt Whitman is writing about democracy; Nathaniel Hawthorne is writing about gender and the state; Harriet Beecher Stowe is writing about slavery. Of course, these critics are right. But what they don’t often consider is this: American politics was always literary in the first place. The Declaration of Independence is full of narrative bravado; court cases feature protagonists and their bitter antagonists; and political debates are rich with conflicts, rising action, shifting points of view, and even narrators commenting on the action with scorching irony. In this course we will read the origins of U.S. Politics: the Declaration, newspaper coverage of veterans’ affairs, and political campaigns — for its aesthetic properties. We will also read U.S. literary writers as savvy participants in this very same cultural field, who produced new ways of being citizens through new ways of telling those same stories. This course will read literary and historical criticism that addresses politics, citizenship, and aesthetics, primary texts from the late-18th and early-to-mid-19th centuries, and literature by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, and Catharine Maria Sedgwick. Written work will include descriptive and interpretive essays of primary sources, an essay of formal literary analysis, annotated bibliographies of literary criticism, and a final essay that addresses politics, aesthetics, literature, and criticism.
ENGL 300 – Section M; Topic: “Post-Soul” African American Fiction
T/R 9:30-10:45
Advanced Composition Course
“Post-Soul” African American Fiction
This course will examine a constellation of African American narratives published in the last thirty years, by a cohort of newer authors that have been defined by some scholars as Post-Soul. These authors possess a novel and increasingly complex relationship to black identity, frequently calling attention in their works to the changing dynamics of racial community in the post-Civil Rights era. Throughout the semester, we will consider how contemporary theoretical debates about African American culture and identity inform these narratives, paying particular attention to how their authors tackle the intersection of race with social class, gender, and sexuality.
ENGL 300 – Section P1; Topic: Poems of Love by the Brownings
T/R 11-12:15
Advanced Composition Course
Poems of Love by the Brownings
If you’ve heard anything of the Victorian poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) and Robert Browning (1812-1889), chances are you know them through the romantic if rather hackneyed myth of their love affair and escape to Italy. Less common knowledge is that both poets were outspoken defenders of civil liberties at home and abroad. To both of them, marriage afforded the private space for practicing the negotiation of freedoms, brokering of compromises, and expression and constraint of passions necessary in a healthy democracy. With the aid of critical theorists like Iris Marion Young and Nancy Fraser, and Victorian writers on Marriage Law like Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and Mona Caird, we will study the Brownings’ poetry on the topic of love for what it reveals about personal and public ethics. Our readings will include dramatic monologues like ?Lady Geraldine’s Lover? (1844), and ?Bianca Among the Nightingales? (1862), companion poems like ?My Last Duchess? and ?Count Gismond? (1842), and long poems like the sonnet cycle Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), the verse-novel Aurora Leigh (1856), and sections of the murder-mystery The Ring and the Book (1868).
ENGL 300 – Section S; Topic: Sex & Revolution
T/R 2-3:15
Advanced Composition Course
Sex and Revolution: British Women’s Writing, Mary Woolstonecraft [sic] to Jane Austen
All of Europe was spellbound in 1793 when the French revolutionaries marched their king and (a few months later) their queen to the guillotine or “national razor” and chopped off their heads. In the ensuing Reign of Terror, some 40,000 “traitors of the revolution” were executed. No nation followed the events in France with greater interest than Britain, France’s close neighbor and long-time opponent. The French revolution was greeted with unbridled enthusiasm by British progressives (especially in its early phases, before the Terror) and with horror by conservatives. Indeed, some of the most important contours of the left-right political divide, as we understand it today, were established in Britain during the 1790s, which saw the publication of such landmarks of Anglo-American conservatism as Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and of liberalism such as Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791) and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). This course considers how British women writers of the period responded to the ideological upheaval generated by the French revolution, and above all, how they transformed the debate about the “rights of man” into a vigorous one about women’s rights as citizens, moral agents, and members of civil society. Some of the most interesting discussions of women’s place in society and their capacity for self-governance were conducted through the medium of literature (as opposed to philosophical and political treatises), and especially the novel, a genre that, in this period, was importantly by, for, and about women. Our readings, therefore, will be primarily literary though we will also examine such key political treatises as Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Novels include Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman; or Maria, Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest, Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney, and Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.
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Kristine McCoskey, Ed M
Academic Advisor
Department of English
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign