CAS EN 220: Undergraduate Seminar in Literature Academic Year 2024-2025, 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 2025
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 A1 Voekel
TR 9:30 – 10:45a
The Poetry of War
This course will explore war as poets have observed, justified, glorified, and condemned it from ancient through recent times. What do poems tell us about the experience of combat, for soldiers and civilians, for the victorious and the defeated? How does poetry celebrate and commemorate war, and what does it tell us about the virtues associated with war—the sacrifice and discipline and courage—and about the carnage and atrocity and trauma? In addition to memorizing and reciting war poetry, we will answer these questions by examining the historical context of some poems and attending to the way poems converse with each other across the ages.
EN 220 B1 Walsh
TR 12:30 – 1:45p
Enlightenment Philosophy and Literature
The English and European enlightenments produced a great variety of writing that straddles the line between philosophy and literature. There are lunar voyages, satires, spy novels, utopias and dystopias, freedom and survival narratives, and, of course, novels, many written by women. What was it about the Enlightenment that triggered this literary activity? What role did literature play in promoting, or restricting, the spread of Enlightenment ideas? Were those ideas worth promoting in the first place? In pursuit of answers to these questions, we will familiarize ourselves with the philosophies of Bacon, Herbert of Cherbury, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, and Hume.
EN 220 C1 Prince
MWF 11:15a – 12:05p
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 D1 Howell
TR 3:30 – 4:45p
The Boundaries of Being
How do writers create distinctions between lifeless matter and living beings in fictional worlds made out of mere marks on a page? And how can we understand matter to either lose or acquire sentience? How do readers distinguish between the act of shearing of a blushing sheep and of skinning of a dead lamb? What happens when a baby leaps naked and helpless into the “dangerous world”? We will discuss what it means to think of the world as dangerous in 2024 with particular attention the stories people tell and the language writers use to describe the intersecting effects of US settler colonialism, racism, and the climate crisis. Authors include Audre Lorde, Thomas Hardy, William Blake, Franz Kafka, Rebecca Solnit, James Baldwin and Jesmyn Ward.
We explore five interlocking topics: 1) the philosophical and scientific question of how we define being, and where life begins and ends; 2) birth, death, and other transitions between being and non-being; 3) individuation and the individual: where an individual begins and ends: how the boundaries of a self are constructed and broken down; 4) the philosophical history of how human beings have defined themselves in relation to animals, so as to understand what happens when we refuse to acknowledge the existence of another being, and 5) debates on whether we are beholden to one another as beings, and, if so, to what types of beings that mutual care and responsibility extends. This course tracks the contrasts writers set up between sensitive, receptive surfaces and the inanimate world.This course is an intensive writing course that will help you learn to write, edit, and revise a strong college paper in the genre of literary analysis and argument.
EN220 E1 Henchman
TR 2:00 – 3:15
Monsters!
This course introduces students to literary analysis through writing on monsters. From a young age we are invited to wonder what lives under the bed or in the shadows. As the etymology goes, monsters reveal that which is unknown or difficult to comprehend. Monsters speak to particular anxieties of cultural moments; they can be healers and heroes but are more often the hurt and hunted. In this course we will ask: How do we differentiate between human and monster? At what point does one exceed or not meet the standards of humanity and become a monster? What do monsters reveal? Together we will turn a light onto some of literature’s iconic and lesser-known monsters. Expect to encounter dog-headed saints, love-lost werewolves, cursed revenants, lesbian vampires, and shape-shifting aliens. The literature for this course is multigeneric, and thus will include a range of genres, periods, and media. This course fulfills BU Hub requirements: Writing, Research, and Inquiry, Oral and/or Signed Communication, and Research and Information Literacy.
EN220 F1 Goodrich
MWF 12:20 – 1:10p