ENGL 390 Junior Seminar in English
The Junior Seminar is a small discussion-oriented seminar required of all majors emphasizing advanced critical approaches to a literary topic. Enrollment is restricted to English majors who will pass the College 3rd Year Writing Requirement by satisfactory completion of the course writing requirements.
Objects of Beauty:
In her recent book On Beauty and Being Just Elaine Scarry makes the claim that "At the moment we see something beautiful we undergo a radical decentering." Others might suggest that notions of beauty have been used precisely to center certain normative standards often violently marginalizing those who do not adhere. Whether dismissed as frivolous theorized as a philosophical category of inquiry or politicized in the service of feminist or anti-racist discourse beauty does many things: it captivates it incites pleasure and desire it oppresses and subjugates and it excludes. Throughout the course of this term we will evaluate Scarry's claim looking at texts dealing with both theoretical and practical aspects of aesthetic experience. Beginning with Aristotle we will evaluate Western theorizations of beauty through the Enlightenment and into the contemporary era. In addition we will look at how non-Western writers have responded to aesthetic norms imposed upon them. Texts such as Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction and Maxine Craig's Ain't I a Beauty Queen will provide a framework for examining how politics of race class and gender shape questions of aesthetic value. Within this theoretical context we will consider representations of beauty in print and visual culture including popular cinema and literature. Throughout the term we will focus on developing tools of scholarly analysis written and verbal. Each student will be expected to engage in detailed and incisive discussions of each work and write a formal research paper. (Fall)
Love and Death in Contemporary American Novels:
The study of works by Toni Morrison Alice Walker Louise Erdrich Leslie Marmon Silko Michael Ondaatje and Junot Diaz will enable us to explore the forms that love takes when it is grounded in the tumultuous histories of African American Native American or Dominican American people. The theoretical frameworks for reading will be provided by narrative theory and psychoanalytic theory. The course will give particular attention to the narrative forms of these novels by contemporary writers of color. (Spring)
Junior Seminar in English: Lyric Forms:
This junior seminar will explore the development of lyric poetry (especially sonnets, elegies, odes, pastoral poems, and devotional and love lyrics) and of theoretical reflections on what lyric is and does in Anglophone modernity. Canvassing the ways “lyric” has functioned as a term for particular kinds of expression, thought, and classification--and even as a paradigm for interpretation itself--this class will provide students with a set of tools to read closely and write about an archive of lyric poetry from the 16th-century to the contemporary moment. Even though it is ostensibly the most personal and hermetic of literary genres, lyric perpetually reveals what the philosopher Theodor Adorno calls a “collective undercurrent,” a complex relay between word and world, the expressivity of an individual poetic voice and the social structures that shape the forms and possibilities of expression. We will, for that reason, attend to how lyric has crystalized different historically situated understandings of self and society, of longing and loss, with an eye towards how the form of a short poem, how it sounds and feels and means, exposes aesthetic, philosophical, and political questions of great urgency.