English Honors Seminars
Department of English
University of Iowa
(Please note that these are tentative course descriptions and may be subject to change.)
Fall 2017
1)ENGL 4009
“City Comedy and Comedy of Manners” – Taught by Prof. Alvin Snider
MW 3:30-4:50 pm
Among the plays that flourished on the seventeenth-century stage were city comedy and the comedy of manners, two dramatic types with several features in common. Around 1600, playwrights peopled city comedy with characters with an eye for the main chance, hot in pursuit of money, status, and love during a period of economic expansion and widespread social dislocation. The comedy of manners, which came into its own after 1660, presents characters who navigate the complexities of gender, social mobility, conspicuous consumption, and marriage. Both types exhibit a self-conscious cosmopolitanism that gets contrasted with the idiocy of rural life. Either set in London or standing in its shadow, the plays identify themselves with the city, from their lowest haunts to the most fashionable resorts, and usually profess disdain for the provinces. They adopt a sort of worldly localism, linking themselves to specific urban sites while satirizing city morals and manners no less than provincialism. Over the semester we will discuss the emergence and popularity of these two genres, connections between London theatre and the places it both celebrates and mocks, and transformations of these theatrical conventions towards the start of the eighteenth century.
The comedies we study span over 100 years: Jonson, Every Man in His Humour(1598); Middleton, A Trick to Catch the Old One (1605) and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1611); Dekker and Middleton, The Roaring Girl (1611); Molière, Les Précieuses ridicules (in translation as “Such Foolish Affected Ladies,” 1659); Wycherley, The Country Wife (1675); Etherege, The Man of Mode (1676); Vanbrugh, The Provok’d Wife (1697); and Congreve, The Way of the World (1700).
Class meetings include active participation, presentations, and screening of an entire performance available on DVD and the Web (The Country Wife). The final project is a critical essay that makes use of research, approximately fifteen to twenty pages in length, which students present to the seminar in the form of a short talk before expanding and revising it for final submission. Together with participation, presentations, and the essay, coursework includes a written exercise that consults research tools used for the study of early British drama.
AREA: British Literature
PERIOD: Early Literatures Through the Seventeenth Century
2)ENGL 4001
“Writing and War” – Taught by Prof. Doris Witt
This seminar will begin by posing the following simple question: Are there any lessons that we, as students of literature, can or should derive from the perhaps surprising fact that, when asked to name books that had had the greatest influence in their lives, both Senator John McCain and President Barack Obama invoked Ernest Hemingway’s classic novel of the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls. We will, of course, read the novel ourselves, and then we will use our resulting conversations (e.g., Are Democrats and Republicans not that different after all? Does great writing transcend ideology?) as a springboard for surveying subsequent classic (e.g., Catch-22, The Things They Carried, In Country) and contemporary (e.g., Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Sand Queen, Sparta, War Porn) American writing about war. Our primary focus will be fiction, but we certainly won’t rule out making brief excursions into nonfiction and poetry to broaden our understanding of the forms that this writing takes. We will, of necessity, also devote time to the problem of gatekeeping—for example, what counts as a “war novel” in the first place and who gets to decide?
All students will be expected to come to class regularly and well prepared and to produce a 12- to 15-page analytic seminar paper that engages with one or more of the texts on the syllabus. We will equip ourselves with the skills for executing such an assignment through a series of preliminary steps along the way: working in subgroups to identify important and/or recent scholarship on specific texts, summarizing that scholarship both orally and in writing for classmates, writing a short abstract about your chosen topic, and constructing an annotated bibliography. In the process we should gain some insight into the benefits and limitations of diverse critical approaches employed by the scholars whose analyses we read, be they feminist or formalist, Marxist or psychoanalytic, or something else entirely. Tentatively, furthermore, the class—or at least interested students—will be provided an opportunity to work with the staff and editor of the Iowa Review as they solicit and vet submissions for the next in a series of special issues the IR publishes biannually featuring winners of a writing contest for veterans. For this reason the class might be of interest to students interested in literary publishing as well as those interested in great writing about war.
AREA: American Literature
PERIOD: 20th/21st Centuries
Spring 2018
1)ENGL 4002
“Samuel Beckett, Modernism, and Media” – Taught by Prof. Jen Buckley
When the young British director Peter Hall staged Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in 1955, he did not pretend to understand the play. He knew, however, that it would challenge London theatre audiences to question everything they thought they knew about drama. In this course we will study how Beckett, whom one prominent biographer called “the last modernist,” shaped his writing to expose and exploit what he considered to be the specific traits of every medium for which he wrote or wrote about: print, theatre, radio, television, film, and the visual arts. We will attend in particular to how Beckett scripted the human body across media, focusing on the ways in which those bodies – often disabled, constrained, neglected, and/or suffering – attempt, and frequently fail, to communicate using speech, writing, movement, and gesture. Our study will be grounded in the production and reception of Beckett’s works in English, though we will address his writing in French, his self-translations of his own work to and from both languages, and his direction of his plays in German.
Readings include a selection of Beckett’s stories, novels, and essays; his plays for the stage, radio, and television; excerpts from his published Theatrical Notebooks and his correspondence; the script of his film, Film; his libretto for the opera Neither; and critical essays about Beckett’s writing. Students will view, listen to, and/or occasionally perform excerpts from his writing for performance. Writing assignments include informal reading journal entries, a short critical essay of 5 pages, and one research-based creative project and/or critical essay of 15-20 pages.
AREA: British Literature
PERIOD: 20th/21st Centuries
2)ENGL 4005
“Freedom’s Line: Writing and Revolution in U.S. Literary Culture” – Taught by Prof. Laura Rigal
The revolutionary tradition in American culture and society has been inseparable from the dream that writing could change the world. In the United States, the great matters of revolutionary modernity – law and violence; structural racism and the rights of man; women’s work, religion and the secular state– are also aesthetic and affective matters of reading, writing and the authority of print. This course is an opportunity to critically investigate major prose genres of the U.S. literary tradition – manifesto, autobiography, slave narrative, gothic and women’s fiction -- that trace lines of revolutionary separation or radical social transformation.
Readings include Tom Paine’s The Crisis; Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography; Charles Brockden Brown’s gothic novel Wieland, or the Transformation; Nat Turner’s Confessions; H.D. Thoreau’s “Life Without Principle”; Black Hawk’s Autobiography; Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; and short works by Charles Chesnutt.
Students will become familiar with selected literary critical works from relevant fields: especially African-American Studies, Indigenous Studies, Gender Studies, Marxist/historicist and post-structuralist literary theory. Three short (5pp) writing assignments and one class presentation will be directed toward the production of a prospectus and final writing project (12-15 pp). Creative writing and digital humanities students are welcome. Final projects will be designed in consultation with the professor.
AREA: American Literature
PERIOD: 18th/19th Centuries