Students intending to continue independent work begun in ENGL 498 are required to submit a five-page prospectus describing in detail the shape of the intended project along with a substantial writing sample from the work completed in ENGL 498. Students beginning a new project who wish to apply for ENGL 499 must submit a five-page description and rationale for the proposed independent study.
This course introduces students to the basic concepts and methods of literary and critical theory, a body of work that explores and critiques modern assumptions about truth, culture, power, language, representation, subject-formation, and identity.
(Offered as ENGL 487 and FAMS 425) In the years following WWII, a series of social, economic, and political transformations dramatically reconfigured American life. Cinema served as both mirror and catalyst during this period, reflecting national crises while also contributing to the reorganization of American culture. This seminar explores both sides of this dynamic, examining how filmmakers represented the dilemmas of the post-WWII period, and how artists, studios, and lawmakers sought to intervene in such dilemmas via the cinema.
This course examines the relationship between narrative and ecology in the transpacific.
“Ecology” as a field of scientific study concerns the “relationships between people, social
Giorgio Agamben writes in Remnants of Auschwitz that “trauma is thus an event that has no beginning, no ending, no before, no during, and no after.” In this seminar, we will study texts from different genres–poetry, fiction, and memoir–that attempt to narrativize the timeless, ubiquitous, and haunted event that is a military dictatorship. How do these texts undertake the task of remembering or reimagining the past? How do they fill the gap between memory and history, between testimony and literature, and between past and present?
(Offered as ENGL 441 and EUST 374) [Before 1800] In this course, we read a selection of English and other European lyrics (in translation) from the twelfth through the seventeenth centuries.
(Offered as ENGL 435 and THDA 335) We don’t just think, speak, or write our ideas; we perform them, too. Think TED Talks, political rallies, or 400-level seminars in English. In this course, you will read plays that are fueled by an argument and arguments that look like plays. Readings will range from ancient philosophical dialogues to modern “plays of ideas”–from essays on pedagogy to works of social theory. As the semester wears on, you will begin to research your own angle on our central theme: ideas performed.
What is theater, in theory? How is drama different from theater---and what are the implications of this distinction? Moreover, how have theater and drama historically been deployed (and/or theorized) as tools for changing the world? This course explores a multi-century’s long engagement with the question of what theater/drama is, what it does, what it could be, and what it should be. Finally, we will explore various theoretical perspectives regarding the conceptual differences between “theater,” “drama,” and “performance” as overlapping yet distinct cultural phenomena.
(Offered as ENGL 388 and FAMS 240.)
(Offered as ENGL 385, FAMS 308, SWAG 309) As an artistic and industrial form, film depends on acts of collaboration. Such acts take place at the level of production, whether on a Hollywood lot that might employ hundreds if not thousands of people to make a single film or in an independent artisan’s work in which one primary maker works with the subjects she films.
