300-Level English Courses

Literature

EN 311-001 Special Topics in Literature: Adventure Literature Nathan Parker

The heart of this course will be the study of the Archetype of the Restless Wanderer in the movies and literature of adventure, with due love for the dead-sea-scroll-gold that is Melville’s “Call me Ishmael,” but with special focus on the words of western wanderers written post shadow-of-death World War I. Bilbo Baggins, for example: “Do we really have to go through?” Gandalf: “Yes, you do.” Samuel Beckett, for antithetical example: “…but with us the last journey is Soon Done. It is in vain you quicken your pace.” We will read classic adventure novels such as The Hobbit alongside works that challenge the very idea of ‘adventure’ such as Beckett’s Texts for Nothing. How does this literature shape our cultural understandings of the soul’s pilgrimage in modern society? Through a historical and philosophical lens, we will analyze depictions of the social & spiritual Self (C.G. Jung’s personality #1 & personality #2) in these works, as well as in contemporary films such as Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation and Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man.

EN 344-001 Major Authors 1600-1900: Oscar Wilde Daniel Novak

Oscar Wilde has come to stand for so many (sometimes contradictory) things: An icon of homosexuality and of gay martyrdom; of Irish identity; of modernity; of the aesthete; or even of literature itself. Wilde’s life and his position as a cultural icon so often dominates our understanding of his texts that it is sometimes hard to remember him as a writer. This class will offer a survey of Wilde’s writing (plays, poems, fiction, and non-fiction essays) as well as critical, biographical, and theoretical work on Wilde, in order to ask how Wilde himself defines the terms by which he is most often understood—identity and desire, body and text, performance and essence. We will also look at other writers of the 1880s and 90s to contextualize Wilde within a larger British fin-de-siècle culture. Rather than looking for “the real Oscar Wilde” (the title of a book by one of Wilde’s first biographers) we will be exploring what is at stake in our culture’s myths and interpretations of Oscar Wilde.