CAS EN 220: Undergraduate Seminar in Literature Academic Year 2022-2023, Semester II
Fundamentals of literary analysis, interpretation, and research. Intensive study of selected literary texts centered on a particular topic. Attention to different critical approaches. Frequent papers. Limited class size.
Required of concentrators in English.
Satisfies WR 150 requirement.
Fulfills BU Hub requirements: Writing, Research, and Inquiry, Oral and/or Signed Communication, and Research and Information Literacy.
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Topics for Spring 2024
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Writing About Media: Race and the Internet
Description forthcoming.
EN 220 A1 Chude- Sokei
TR 2:00 – 3:15p
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The Rules of Evidence
Because every reader is a detective, this course is devoted to understanding the rules of evidence. Each text that we will address in this seminar in English will take up questions of the construction of meaning, history, and narrative: How do we mobilize information to make arguments? How do we draw “facts” from literary fictions? How does interpretation affect the “reality” of a given set of clues? How do reading practices inform broader cultural phenomena? Primary texts will be drawn from American literature and film, 1840 to the present, and may include works by Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James,
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Amy Lowell, Claude McKay, Susan Glaspell, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Monte Hellman, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Claudia Rankine. Secondary essays will model a number of different theoretical or investigative approaches and supplement our own inquiries.
EN 220 B1 Howell
TR 11:00a – 12:15p
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Place
“Space is movement; place is pause,” writes the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan; “what begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.” Tuan’s observations remind us that while the culture of the US has often been defined as one of mobility, its literature has often paused over places—specific locales that are “endowed with value” by stories, novels, and poems. Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, Robert Frost’s North of Boston, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden all depend for their meanings on places we can find on a map. But what happens to a town or a pond or a wood when it becomes a literary setting? Are such places purely imaginary ones, perhaps places that exist mostly in the mind? Or can literature give us intimate knowledge of local geographies in ways other kinds of writing cannot? The topic is broad and so will involve a variety of subtopics: utopias and dystopias (good places and bad, or green places and toxic ones); the role of region in the formation of personal identity (being a New Englander, for example); tourism, travel, migration and globalization. Readings will range from the 1850s to the present and will include poetry, fiction, and nonfictional prose.
EN 220 C1 Otten
TR 12:30 – 1:45p
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Enlightenment Philosophy and Literature
The English and European enlightenments are marked by a great variety of experimental writing. There are lunar voyages, spy novels, erotic tales, utopias and dystopias, survival narratives, satires, anti-romances, and novels–among many forms. These quasi-literary, quasi-philosophical works protected their authors from direct responsibility for what they expressed between the lines.
They also popularized controversial ideas and questioned entrenched attitudes and dogmas. Writers attuned to problems of otherness–of race, class, gender, and irreligion–recast direct protest in weird fictions that enacted encounters between strangers in strange lands. Studying these works, we encounter some of the earliest English writings on abolition, feminism, and ecology. This seminar does not assume previous study of philosophy. It will introduce students to some of the primary documents of the Enlightenment by Descartes, Hobbes, Herbert of Cherbury, Spinoza, Charles Blount, Locke, and Hume, and then ask what it was about these ideas that helped produce an array of experimental fiction by Francis Bacon, Margaret Cavendish, Cyrano de Bergerac, Lucian (in 17th century translation), Aphra Behn, Ibn Tufayl (12th century Spanish-Arabic in 18th century translation), Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne, and others.
EN 220 D1 Prince
TR 11:00a – 12:15p
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Dangerous Hospitality: Guests and Hosts in Literature
The reception and accommodation of the stranger and outsider is a species-specific behavior of homo sapiens which has taken many different forms over the course of human (and literary) history. Our class will examine this phenomena from Homer’s Odyssey to Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, pausing along the way to consider other works whose central dynamic revolves around the precarious interactions of guests and hosts such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Austen’s Emma, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and Joyce’s “The Dead.” Hospitality exists in the liminal space between rejection and absorption, and these texts brilliantly explore the tensions inherent in the (attempted) taming of the xenos, an ancient Greek word which tellingly can be translated as “guest,” “friend,” “stranger” or “foreigner.”
EN 220 G1 Voekel
TR 9:30 – 10:45a
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