2017-2018 Academic Catalog 
    
    Mar 28, 2024  
2017-2018 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

ENG 262 - Special Topics in 19th-Century British Literature


Special Topics in 19th-Century British Literature. For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the Period (D-2) or the Theory (E) requirement. For English minors, this course counts as a 200-level English course. This course can be repeated with a different topic.

ENG 262.01 WITH PROF. LOU BASTIEN

SPECIAL TOPIC FOR S’18: GREATER ROMANTIC LYRIC

This course examines the transformation of the lyric poem – particularly the ode – from simple observation or insight into an integration of the human consciousness with the natural world – one of the quintessential developments of the Romantic period.  We closely read poems by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats, from “Frost at Midnight” and “Tintern Abbey” to the “Ode to the West Wind” and “To Autumn”. For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the Poetry (C-1), or the Period (D-2) or the Theory (E) requirement. For English minors, this course counts as a 200-level English course.

 

ENG 262.02 WITH PROF. LISA KASMER

SPECIAL TOPIC FOR S’18: QUEER VICTORIANS

The Victorian period was full of writers addressing what we now consider themes of “queer” sexuality and gender. Often, however, these themes have gone unrecognized. Victorian texts, which hold a multivalent emphasis on kinship, desire, matrimony, domesticity, and familial life, stand as a rich resource for analyses of same-sex desire, gendered and sexual subjectivities, and closeting and homophobia. Through texts by authors such as Oscar Wilde, Christina Rossetti, and Wilkie Collins we will look at depictions of nonnormative desires and identities and resistance to heteronormativity. To provide a theoretical context for this exploration, we will focus on queer theory, which examines the way power works to institutionalize and legitimate certain forms and expressions of sexuality and gender while stigmatizing others. For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the Period (D-2) or the Theory (E) requirement. For English minors, this course counts as a 200-level English course.

 

Anticipated Terms Offered: Every other year.