ClassInfo

This section will be focused on the experiences of public and private lives. We will explore how individuals in various positions of power (or powerlessness) negotiate between public and private identities. Texts will include Shakespeare's play Henry V and Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton. Optional service-learning component.

Monarch, Citizen, Rebel: Fictions of Power and Justice from Classical Drama to Contemporary Cinema. Section 002 of ENGL 1501W will explore citizenship partially through a literary examination of some contrasting social and political models. Who holds power? How is power wielded? What constitutes just and unjust uses of power? Is just resistance possible? How do issues of morality and ethics inform both power relations and concepts of justice? What about religion, class, or socio-cultural identity (gender, race, sexuality, nationality)? To consider these and other questions of public life through literature, we will read a broad selection of fictional works that portray issues of power and justice. More specifically, we will isolate three major fictional modes and their characteristic protagonists. First, we will study tragic drama to see how the cataclysms to which it subjects its monarchs call power into question; second, we will read modern novels in the bildungsroman (coming-of-age) genre with an eye to their democratic celebration not of monarchs but of everyday citizens and their quests for justice; to conclude, we will turn to contemporary popular culture, especially such speculative genres as super-hero and dystopia, to encounter rebels who exceed the limits of normative citizenship to attain justice or power. This writing-intensive course requires you to respond to such issues, as they bear on our society, in formal and informal written work; and to encourage your own participation in public life, a service-learning option will give you the chance to collaborate with others on projects that serve the common good. Likely course texts: plays by Sophocles and William Shakespeare, novels by Willa Cather and Toni Morrison, and comics/films by Alan Moore and Christopher Nolan.

Literature and Public Life: Gender, Race and Citizenship. ENGL 1501W Section 003 will explore race, gender and citizenship and consider questions of public life through literature. We will read a broad selection of non-fiction, poetry, and fictional works that question gender, citizenship, race, and economic and social justice. This writing-intensive course requires you to respond to social justice issues in writing--and to encourage your own participation in public life, a service-learning option will give you the chance to collaborate with others on projects that serve the common good. Students will ultimately complete a project of their own devising. Likely course texts include work by authors such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, bell hooks, Sherman Alexie, Audre Lorde, Sophocles, and Claudia Rankine.

What does it really mean to be a responsible citizen and to engage in public discourse? How do we construct our public identities, reconcile our private and public selves, and gain access to the true beliefs and opinions of the many selves and identities which populate our social networks? In the aftermath of possibly the most acrimonious election cycle in US history, these questions acquire an even greater urgency. This class will seek answers in three interrelated places: in literature, in literary expression, and in the literary-like behaviors with which we broadcast our beliefs on social media. We will explore how literature both contributes to the creation of public opinion and influences the "politically correct" and "politically incorrect" attitudes that we use to navigate the contested sites of individual freedom, civic responsibility, and social duty. In addition to studying the power of words in public contexts, students will have the opportunity, through a service-learning project, to turn words into active community engagement. Our wide range of texts and genres -- stories and essays, novels and plays, poems and tweets -- will give us a strong literary basis to ground our discussion of the truths and fictions we all tell ourselves while negotiating our personal worldviews in private and public spaces.

Meaning/practice of citizenship. Historical themes, contemporary issues in American public life: access of citizenship, tensions between social duties and individual freedoms, role of moral values in public life. Diverse literary materials. Optional service-learning component.

Meaning/practice of citizenship. Historical themes, contemporary issues in American public life: access of citizenship, tensions between social duties and individual freedoms, role of moral values in public life. Diverse literary materials. Optional service-learning component.

Monarch, Citizen, Rebel: Fictions of Power and Justice from Classical Drama to Contemporary Cinema. Section 002 of ENGL 1501W will explore citizenship partially through a literary examination of some contrasting social and political models. Who holds power? How is power wielded? What constitutes just and unjust uses of power? Is just resistance possible? How do issues of morality and ethics inform both power relations and concepts of justice? What about religion, class, or socio-cultural identity (gender, race, sexuality, nationality)? To consider these and other questions of public life through literature, we will read a broad selection of fictional works that portray issues of power and justice. More specifically, we will isolate three major fictional modes and their characteristic protagonists. First, we will study tragic drama to see how the cataclysms to which it subjects its monarchs call power into question; second, we will read modern novels in the bildungsroman (coming-of-age) genre with an eye to their democratic celebration not of monarchs but of everyday citizens and their quests for justice; to conclude, we will turn to contemporary popular culture, especially such speculative genres as super-hero and dystopia, to encounter rebels who exceed the limits of normative citizenship to attain justice or power. This writing-intensive course requires you to respond to such issues, as they bear on our society, in formal and informal written work; and to encourage your own participation in public life, a service-learning option will give you the chance to collaborate with others on projects that serve the common good. Likely course texts: plays by Sophocles and William Shakespeare, novels by Willa Cather and Toni Morrison, and comics/films by Alan Moore and Christopher Nolan.