Search Results
Your search for courses · during 23FA · tagged with ENGL Foundation · returned 8 results
-
ENGL 100 Drama, Film, and Society 6 credits
With an emphasis on critical reading, writing, and the fundamentals of college-level research, this course will develop students’ knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of the relationship between drama and film and the social and cultural contexts of which they are (or were) a part and product. The course explores the various ways in which these plays and movies (which might include anything and everything from Spike Lee to Tony Kushner to Christopher Marlowe) generate meaning, with particular attention to the social, historical, and political realities that contribute to that meaning. An important component of this course will be attending live performances in the Twin Cities. These required events may be during the week and/or the weekend.
Held for new first year students. Extra Time required.
-
ENGL 100 How We Read: The History and Science of Reading 6 credits
Humans have been reading for 5,000 years, a period too short to be explained in evolutionary terms but long enough for the purposes and social values of reading to have changed considerably. This class begins with an examination of the cognitive process of reading and then considers what reading has meant to readers at different times. We’ll examine the motivations and reading practices of medieval monks, Renaissance diplomats, enslaved Americans, and midwestern housewives. We’ll reflect on what happens when we read a difficult poem, and we’ll read Napoleon’s favorite novel as example of how reading can be enchanting, inspiring, and dangerously self-destructive. We’ll consider our own histories as readers and examine reading at the present moment, including the way reading on screens may (or may not) be changing our habits.
Held for new first year students
-
ENGL 100.05 Fall 2023
- Faculty:George Shuffelton 🏫 👤
- Size:15
- M, WLibrary 344 11:10am-12:20pm
- FLibrary 344 12:00pm-1:00pm
-
-
ENGL 100 Imagining a Self 6 credits
This course examines how first-person narrators present, define, defend, and construct the self. We will read an assortment of autobiographical and fictional works, focusing on the critical issues that the first-person speaker “I” raises. In particular, we will consider the risks and rewards of narrative self-exposure, the relationship between autobiography and the novel, and the apparent intimacy between first-person narrators and their readers. Authors will include James Boswell, Charlotte Bronte, Harriet Jacobs, Sylvia Plath, and Dave Eggers.
Held for new first year students
-
ENGL 100 Inventing the Past 6 credits
How and why does literature imagine and create versions of the past? In this seminar, we will explore intersections of fiction and history in a variety of texts, in a novel that envisions a vivid physical and emotional world for Shakespeare’s family (Hamnet), in a “biography” that sends its protagonist time-travelling through several centuries and genders (Orlando), and in a work of alternative history that imagines a computerized Victorian era run by Babbage’s Analytical Engine (The Difference Engine), among others.
Held for new first year students
-
ENGL 100 Literary Revision: Authority, Art, and Rebellion 6 credits
The poet Adrienne Rich describes revision as “the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction.” This course examines how literature confronts and reinvents the traditions it inherits. Through a diverse selection of fiction, poetry, and drama, we will examine how writers rework literary conventions, “rewrite” previous literary works, and critique societal myths. From Charles Chesnutt to Charles Johnson, from Henrik Ibsen to Rebecca Gilman, from Charlotte Bronte to Jean Rhys, from Maupassant and Chekhov to contemporary reinventions, we will explore literary revision from different perspectives and periods.
Held for new first year students
-
ENGL 100 Novel, Nation, Self 6 credits
With an emphasis on critical reading and writing in an academic context, this course will examine how contemporary writers from a range of global locations approach the question of the writing of the self and of the nation. Reading novels from both familiar and unfamiliar cultural contexts we will examine closely our practices of reading, and the cultural expectations and assumptions that underlie them.
Held for new first year students
-
ENGL 100 Reading, Interpreting, Writing 6 credits
The texts we will read and the themes to be discussed include: the quest for home and belonging in Angelou’s All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes; transitions in Obama’s Dreams from My Father; difficult and essential conversations in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me; trauma and healing in Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom. Our related focus on expository writing will be complemented by a final writing assignment that offers you the option to craft either a Letter to Your Younger Self on transitions, or an Autobiographical Fragment in which you trace your search for belonging.
Held for new first year students
-
ENGL 118 Introduction to Poetry 6 credits
“Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought”—Audre Lorde. In this course we will explore how poets use form, tone, sound, imagery, rhythm, and subject matter to create works of astonishing imagination, beauty, and power. In discussions, Moodle posts, and essay assignments we’ll analyze individual works by poets from Sappho to Amanda Gorman (and beyond); there will also be daily recitations of poems, since the musicality is so intrinsic to the meaning.