English Honors Seminars

1

English Honors Seminars

Department of English

University of Iowa

Fall 2016

(Please note that these are tentative course descriptions and may be subject to change.)

1)ENGL:4001

“Marilynne Robinson” – Taught by Prof. Lori Branch

This honors seminar focuses on the fiction and nonfiction works of the Pulitzer Prize winning Iowa novelist Marilynne Robinson. In this course we will read all four of Robinson’s novels to date – Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004), Home (2008), and Lila (2014) – as well as a broad swathe of her nonfiction prose, focusing on Death of Adam (1998), Absence of Mind (2010), and The Givenness of Things (2015).

The seminar will be animated by a postsecular critical spirit, pursuing questions that probe the relationship between Robinson’s scintillating prose fiction style and her religious beliefs as expressed in her nonfiction. What particular sort of religiousness do we glimpse in Robinson’s fiction and nonfiction? What is the relationship between religion and secularism in Robinson’s writings? How can we account for Robinson’s explicitly religious fiction speaking powerfully to secular readers in a secular age? In what sense might her novels productively be thought of as postsecular? At its furthest reaches, our reading of Robinson’s fiction will enable us to participate in scholarly conversations about the fundamental relationship many critics have posited between the secularism and the genre of the novel.

AREA: American Literature

PERIOD: 20th/21st-Century Literature

2)ENGL:4003

“What are you going to do with that? The Arts and Humanities in the Creative Economy” – Taught by Prof. Claire Fox

This seminar explores ways in which the arts, literature, and other creative endeavors enter into economies and systems of value in contemporary society. What is collectively called the “creative economy” encompasses a range of activities in diverse locations, from traditional arts and humanities professions to broad economic sectors in which creativity plays a role, including DIY productions, fan culture, street art, urban planning, cultural tourism, media production, gaming, crafting, branding, upcycling, and sharing.

How do creativity and the market interact and intersect? This seminar departs from the paradox of attaching monetary value to the imagination, a paradox with which UI English majors are likely familiar, since they are not only drawn to creativity, but also positioned alternately as ‘consumers’ and ‘products’ in a rapidly changing public university system. Through discussion of literature, movies, criticism, visual art and performance, we explore current debates about the economic value of the arts, literature, and culture, and about theories of value and utility more generally. I hope that English majors will not only leave this class with a few good answers up their sleeve when asked, “what are you going to do with that?” but also prepared to enter into conversations about the arts and humanities in their everyday life.

The course is divided into two sections. In the first part of the semester, we read books and articles and watch films that explore aspects of the creative economy as it pertains to higher education, urban life, popular and mass culture, and globalization. In the second part of the semester, students identify one aspect of the creative economy that they would like to investigate in greater depth, in consultation with the professor. They develop a research proposal and methodology for carrying out the project, which, depending on the topic, might include participant observation, ethnography, interviews, oral histories, archival research, and textual or visual analysis. Class meetings during this part of the semester feature peer reporting and review and meetings with the professor. The final project can be a critical essay, creative essay, or other research project of approximately 15-20 pages in length. Students present their research findings at our final class meeting.

AREA: Literary Theory and Interdisciplinary Studies

PERIOD: 20th/21st- Century Literature

3)ENGL:4005

“Media Shift: Benjamin Franklin, Edgar Allan Poe, and Dave Eggers” – Taught by Prof. Matt Brown

Why did Benjamin Franklin prefer the Spanish print-house custom of inverting a question mark at the beginning of a query? Why did Edgar Allan Poe attempt an early form of photocopying, known as “anastatic printing”? Why did Dave Eggers make Garamond 3 the typeface of choice for McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern? These questions illustrate the kinds of inquiry and appreciation pursued in the field known as book studies.

The subject of this course will be the dynamics of literary expression in the context of information revolutions. Class members explore three (extended) moments of media shift, by which is meant a change in how words and images are delivered to audiences. We will examine the hand-press era of eighteenth-century colonial America through the figure of Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), when the meanings of print, handwriting, and speech were transformed due to the spread of print-houses and the rise of the public sphere. Next we will appreciate the career of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), caught as it was in the teeth of mass, industrial printing. Poe’s struggles involved the use of old media and new formats to advance his writerly goals. Finally, we will survey our current transitional phase—where the print and the digital coexist—through the work of Dave Eggers (1970- ). Toggling between the traditional book format and new media venues, Eggers engages readers with writing that is simultaneously playful and serious. All three figures are both literary artists and book business entrepreneurs: that is, they are authors, editors, publishers, designers, and makers. In-class discussion and brief lectures will be complemented by visits to Special Collections in the Main Library. Along with preparation and participation, coursework includes short writing assignments, research exercises, and formal essays.

AREA: American Literature

PERIOD: 18th/19th- Century Literature

Spring 2017

(Please note that these are tentative course descriptions and may be subject to change.)

1)ENGL:4003

“Being Human: Foundations in Environmental Humanities” – Taught by Prof. Barbara Eckstein

Being human isn’t what it used to be. Or rather, it is what it used to be but now we know more about it.

• We know that our own human bodies are largely made up of other microscopic creatures, that the environment is us and we are the environment. (See Jane Hirschfield’s cool poem “My Proteins.”)

• We know that we humans have been biological agents for a long time, deliberately or inadvertently moving all sorts of plants and animals around the globe as we colonized lands, fought wars, climbed mountains, crossed seas. (Everything from smallpox to breadfruit.)
• We know that we humans have also been geological agents for quite some time, that our industrial, agricultural, and even just domestic activity has changed the atmosphere and thus the oceans and the land. (Some would say we have created a geological age with our name on it, an anthropocene, discernible in the history of rocks. Some would also say that the future, not the past, now determines the present.)
• We know that we are not the only agents on the globe, that viruses and hummingbirds, floods and electrons have their own—well—ideas.
• And yes, we know that the risks created by our human activity—toxins and rising seas and unclean water and resource extraction messes—are not distributed equally among humans specifically and among living things generally.

This seminar engages what we now know about the relationship of humans and environment to ask what artists, interpreters of the arts, and critical thinkers are doing and can do with this knowledge.

The seminar is organized like this: first it reconsiders the definitions of “environment,” “nature,” “wilderness,” and “human.” It then takes up four case studies, each in three different ways. Those case studies are climate change, extraction, extinction, and waste. The three approaches for each are matters of fact, matters of environmental justice, and matters of feelings. At the end of the seminar we return to definitions, this time looking at ways of imagining the future creatively: “resilience,” “sustainability,” “rewilding,” “survivance.” Although the seminar makes use of cross-disciplinary knowledge and introduces exciting literary and other artistic practices engaging environmental ideas, the larger point is that this twenty-first century version of being human inspires us to rethink all of literary history, all of human history. There’s so much for artists, interpreters, and critical thinkers to do!

Students will be asked to be experts on particular class readings, shaping discussion and writing annotations, and they will be asked to write short reading response essays and create a final research project of some 10 pages. There will also be an opportunity for the class to take their expertise into the public realm.In addition to English Honors students, this seminar is appropriate for Sustainability Certificate students seeking a course from which to build a final project.

Areas: Literary Theory & Interdisciplinary Studies

Period: 20th/21st-Century Literature

2)ENGL:4006

“Charles Dickens and Narrative Theory” – Taught by Prof. Garrett Stewart

As the most popular major novelist in English literary history, Dickens laid down the tracks for any number of narrative strategies that persist today in ambitious fiction as well as Hollywood film. Beyond his stylistic genius, unprecedented except by Shakespeare, his novels steadily experimented with, tweaked, renovated, or pressed to the point of ironic breakdown an entire arsenal of narrative techniques that have received much discussion (and adaptation) since, from “omniscience” to “free indirect discourse” and other varieties of “focalization,” including “stream of consciousness,” “frame narrative,” and “reader address,” not to mention a sustained fascination with what we now call the “metafictional” dimension of literary plotting. At the same time, his experiments in “point of view,” “jump cuts,” “parallel montage,” etc., offered early film directors a ready-made ocular vocabulary for the new medium.

With some sideways attention to this Dickensian legacy in film structure and editing (rather than the endless filming and televising of his fiction), we will read selected novels of his mature period against the developing backdrop of representative essays and books in contemporary narrative theory, with a special emphasis on influential works in a structuralist, psychoanalytic, and Marxist vein. Novels like Dombey and Son, Bleak House, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend will thus come into conversation with theorists like Roland Barthes, René Girard, Peter Brooks, and Fredric Jameson.

The course is designed for “creative writers” as well as “literary critics,” and we will make space (if there is an interest in this) to test some of the narrative devices in your own writing (chapter openings, transitional phrasings, perspectival shifts, closure, including as well the stylistic finesse of diction and syntax, metaphor and wordplay) against touchstone moments in Dickensian prose. Though known as “the Inimitable” in his day, Dickens nonetheless offers a wealth of ongoing models for narrative inventiveness across media, and not least (given his monthly-installment format) on the current prestige of serial TV. Frequent oral reports and a 15-20 page seminar will pace and distill, respectively, your immersive reading.

AREA: British Literature

PERIOD: 18th/19th- Century Literature