Spring 2023
Senior/Capstone Seminars for American Literature and Culture Majors
Literature of the Beat Generation
Topics in 20th and 21st Century American Literature
English 183C / Prof. Dickey
Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass.
Toni Morrison
Topics in African American Literature
English M191A.1 / Prof. Streeter
Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass.
Feminist and Queer Negative Affects
Topics in Gender and Sexuality
English M191E / Prof. S.K. Lee
Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass.
Senior/Capstone Seminars for English Majors
The Literature of The Law
Topics in Interdisciplinary Studies
English 181B / Prof. Shuger
Medieval Drama
Topics in Medieval Literature
English 182A / Prof. Chism
This class explores the beginnings of English drama with attention to recent developments in gender studies, performance theory, and cultural studies. Beginning with continental liturgical and twelfth-century church drama, centering on the English Corpus Christi cycles, the saint’s and morality plays, and pursuing its line through the Reformation and the beginnings of the English professional theater, this course explores the way medieval society performed itself at some of its most contested cultural intersections.
We will explore the following questions:What does premodern, pre-fourth-wall, nonrealistic drama offer to modernist, postcolonial, surrealist recaptures and detournements of drama as social and cognitive intervention? What are the most profitable theoretical approaches to a drama that predates realism and falls between the abstractions of allegory on the one hand and the absorptions of individual psychology on the other? How do the plays negotiate the relationships between the material objects and bodies upon the stage, the historical and biblical narratives they embody, the verities they signify, and the conflicting social urgencies of their audiences. What civic spaces are realigned by these itinerant dramaturgies? What institutional orthodoxies are perplexed by the scandalous spectacle of Christ’s theatrically wounded body or Mary’s virginal, pregnant body? How can a theater be both popular and sacramental? How were the plays materially produced, and with what itineraries, stage-machines, censorships? How does the distinction between theater and performance break down when audiences went not only to watch but to participate? How did sixteenth-century humanism, the English reformation and the gradual professionalization of the theater affect the many forms of medieval drama and what continuities can we trace into subsequent periods?
The primary anthology, David Bevington’s Medieval Drama, is very approachable in terms of language: Latin, French, and German plays have facing page translations, and the Middle English ones are very well glossed. I’ve used this anthology for years with undergraduates.
Secondary texts may include: Herbert Blau, Richard Schechner, Sarah Beckwith, Theresa Coletti, Michael Pearson, and Richard D. McCall.
Requirements: 2 conference length papers, OR a draft and a longer term paper, OR a term project with both creative and analytical components (such as a performance and a debrief): (60%); short weekly response papers (25%); class presentation (singly or in a group).(15%).
Literature of the Beat Generation
Topics in 20th and 21st Century American Literature
English 183C / Prof. Dickey
Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass.
The Brontës in Context
Capstone Seminar
English 184 / Prof. Stephan
Toni Morrison
Topics in African American Literature
English M191A.1 / Prof. Streeter
Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass.
Feminist and Queer Negative Affects
Topics in Gender and Sexuality
English M191E / Prof. S.K. Lee
Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass.