Topics Courses, Fall '24
Topics courses cover a wide variety of content, allowing students to explore different subject matter while fulfilling the requirements for the major or minor.
ENG 197E The Art of Living Well
Amity Reading
MWF 9:10-10:10
For millennia, the greatest thinkers and writers in human history have grappled with the question “what does it mean to ‘live well’?” For Greek and Roman philosophers, the question was centered on the concept of “the good life” or “the examined life.” But what is “goodness”? What needs to be known or practiced to live well, and how does “examining” our lives lead to fulfillment? For some, living well means living with restraint and moderation, seeking to limit bodily pleasure in order to purify the heart and elevate the mind. For others, living well means quite the opposite: getting the most out of our short time on Earth and seeking pleasure wherever it can be found. For secular activists as well as devout practitioners of many world religions, living well requires working actively to improve the lives of others instead of focusing solely on the self. In today’s world, we are often told that “happiness,” “balance,” and “wellness” are central to a life well lived. But what is “wellness” as we use the term today, and how should we process the reality that our physical bodies will inevitably become old, unwell, and broken over the course of our lives? This course explores all of these ideas and more as we seek to define for ourselves what it means to “live well.” Course readings will come from a variety of textual traditions across the globe and throughout human history, and will include selections from philosophical, religious, and literary texts. Authors and texts will range from the famously canonical (Plato, Cicero, Augustine, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Du Bois, Morrison, selected Buddhist kōans and sutras, excerpts from the Tao Te Ching and the Quran, excerpts from the Viking Eddas) to the commonplace (present-day podcasts about daily gratitude exercises, American self-help books like Brianna Wiest’s The Mountain is You, record-breaking bestseller The Fault in Our Stars by John Green).
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ENG 197F Recasting Narratives: Adaptation
Chris White
MW 2:20-3:50
This course will explore the process of adaptation as relates to creative, especially literary, works. We will examine how art becomes other art—changing the shape of the source material—sometimes with thoughtful fidelity, sometimes with wild abandon. From real life events into articles, from articles into books or plays, from memoirs or novels into films—narratives are constantly being recast into different forms. How do the freedoms and limitations of different genres serve to shape the various incarnations? What is important about adaptation beyond loyalty to the ‘original?’ How do our responses to various adaptations, and even the adaptations themselves, reflect social and political climates, morality, and cultural views of what makes art? How does literary adaptation reflect larger notions of evolution and change? In addition to reading, screening, discussing and writing about these transformations, you will work with adaptation from the creative side through crafting adaptations of your own.
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ENG 245A Nature Writing (W)
Prof. Greg Schwipps
MWF 10:20 - 11:20
This course will examine contemporary nature writing, primarily in the genres of fiction and nonfiction (along with several films), and the issues associated with such work. Using anthologies like Wildbranch: An Anthology of Nature, Environmental, and Place-based Writing, and books like J. Drew Lanham’s The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature, this course will require students to read a range of voices and experiences, and active class discussion will be part of our work. As a W class, students will write a variety of assignments. Nature writing today explores what might be obvious terrain: climate change and habitat loss. But many writers are also wondering about issues of diversity (who gets to enjoy green spaces and why?) and things like screen addiction (what does Richard Louv mean by “nature-deficit disorder” and does it matter?) Students can expect a chance to add their own voices to the ongoing conversation.
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ENG 255B Topics: Medieval Tabloid
Amity Reading
Tues./Thurs. 12:40-2:10
Political intrigue, the Black Death, giants, plagues of the undead, human sacrifice, werewolves, magic spells—these are the scandalous, the surprising, the utterly bizarre... and the completely historical. This class will explore a range of real texts from the global Middle Ages (roughly 500 CE to 1500 CE), all of which record weird and fantastical tales. We'll be reading about ancient Irish curses, as well as Italian ghosts, untranslatable Austrian manuscripts, and a French dog that was granted sainthood by the Catholic church. Readings will include selections from the Irish epic Táin Bó Cúailnge, M.R. James' collection of European ghost stories, the travel narratives of Arabic diplomat Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, and the Arthurian narratives of the Welsh Mabignogian. This course counts toward the Global Learning requirement.
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ENG 264A Women Writers of the African Diaspora
(crosslist with AFR ST 240 and WGSS 290)
Prof. Deborah Geis
Tues./Thurs. 12:40-2:10 pm
In this course, we will focus on contemporary women writers of African descent, particularly their postcolonial experiences in the Caribbean, Latin America, the U.S., and the U.K. Our readings will cover a variety of genres, including fiction, memoir, drama, and poetry. Some of the authors we study may include Jamaica Kincaid, Edwige Danticat, Safiya Sinclair, Helen Oyeyemi, Bernardine Evaristo, and recent performance poets. This is an interdisciplinary course that will require active reading and participation.
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ENG 366A The Romantic Period
Prof. Victoria Wiet
MWF 12:30-1:30
Romanticism (1770-1850) was one of the most innovative periods in European literature, setting the stage for modern literature by transforming the conventions of lyric poetry and perfecting the form of the novel. It also coincided with the height of competition between Europe’s major empires. This course will examine how the context of empire shaped the central tenets of modern sexuality in the West—companionate marriage, compulsory heterosexuality, and racially endogamous coupling—and how writers during the Romantic period used poetry, fiction, and travel writing to express the danger and allure of varieties of sexuality deemed as “other.” We will also engage writers from the colonies who bore witness to how colonization impacted the ordering of intimate and domestic life in their native lands. Organized around the geographic centers of imperial expansion and contestation, our readings will span canonical authors from the Romantic period like Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Alexandre Dumas, and Victor Hugo; women writers such as Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Jane Austen, and Claire de Duras; colonial writers such as Rifa’a at-Tahtawi, Henry Ferozio, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, and Ignace Dau; and key texts in postcolonial theory and Black feminist thought.
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ENG 255A Literature and Pandemic
Prof. Harry Brown
Tues./Thurs. 10:00-11:30
In The Plague, Albert Camus writes: “Everyone knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world, yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from the blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history, yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.” Even four years removed from the COVID-19 pandemic, with its freshly remembered social and economic shocks and aftershocks, we still sometimes think of it as unprecedented. In fact, as Camus suggests, it has many precedents. As an essential facet of human biological and historical experience, pandemics have left long and discernable trails through literature. By following these trails, we can discover how contagion has shaped our consciousness, changing the ways we think about nature, the body, society, modernity, government, and God. Our readings will range widely from ancient and medieval accounts of bubonic plague to the emergent post-COVID literature, including Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, Geraldine Brooks’ Year of Wonders, Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Camus’s The Plague, Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, José Saramago’s Blindness, Ling Ma’s Severance, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, and the collectively authored Fourteen Days. In addition to novels and plays, we will explore science writing on disease, histories of specific pandemic events, and recent essays about the impact of COVID-19 on literature and culture. Ultimately, we will find, as the historian Jill Lepore writes, that “in the literature of pestilence, the greatest threat isn’t the loss of human life but the loss of what makes us human.” As Lepore suggests, pandemic pushes us to the edge of the literary and the human, often rendering language powerless and making people brute. What happens at this outer edge of human experience, where language and literature confront a crisis that surprises us no matter how often it happens?
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ENG255C African American Cinema (W) (cross list with AFST290A and FLME260A)
Prof. Karin Wimbley
Mon./Wed. 2:20-3:50 MW
Reading African American cinema as a pivotal archive in African American cultural production, this course explores the diverse black aesthetic traditions that African American film has and continues to develop, explore, and shape. Specifically, we will track how African American films produced, written, and/or directed by African Americans are situated in larger debates about the politics of race and representation. Beginning with African American modernism and black cultural politics, we will look at the emergence of African American cinema in the 1910s through to the second decade of the 21st century. Films we will investigate include works by Oscar Micheaux, Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Regina King, and Barry Jenkins, to name a few. As a ‘W’ course, we will also spend time on writing composition, with emphasis on how to craft a compelling thesis-driven essay.
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ENG 264B U.S. Women’s Autobiography (crosslist with WGSS 290)
Prof. Karin Wimbley
Tues./Thurs. 12:40-2:10
This interdisciplinary course explores how American women narrate and represent their lives across media, including literature, the graphic novel, and fine art. We will pay particular attention to women’s autobiographical practices that employ both image and text to address the complexities of self-representation and the intersectionality of culture, memory, fiction, and history within these practices. Course themes include: definitions of national belonging; intertextuality and the construction of self; transformation and conversion narratives as social/political critique; and loss of innocence as a counter-hegemonic feminist strategy. The texts this course examines include works by Adrian Piper, Lorie Novak, Alison Bechdel, Maxine Hong Kingston, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and Elissa Washuta, to name a few.
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ENG 322A Hermit Crabs & Borrowed Forms: Harnessing the Power of Personal Narratives Using Familiar Forms
Prof. Samuel Autman
Tues./Thurs. 12:40-2:10
The term “hermit crab essay,” coined in 2003 by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola in their book Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction, refers to essays that take the form of something un-essay-like—such as a recipe, how-to manual, or marriage license—and use this form to tell a story or explore a topic. The human story becomes the hermit crab borrows a form or shell to express itself. In the last twenty years the form has exploded blurring the lines between fiction and nonfiction. Also called “borrowed form.”
This class is a meditation on repurposing familiar forms through research, imagination and craft. We are surrounded by so many forms we take them for granted. Some examples include the Bible or any sacred text, song lyrics, phone books, newspaper articles, obituaries, resumes, class schedules, dating profiles, government documents such as the U.S. Constitution, famous speeches like Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s, “I Have a Dream,” screenplays, scripts, letters, directions on board games and how-to-manuals are just a few. As we delve into the material you are going to hopefully see infinite possibilities at your fingertips. Once you start over laying your narratives onto borrowed forms you may strangely find a liberty in the forum. It feels counterintuitive. My goal is to open your imagination to nonfiction’s greater possibilities.
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ENG 393A The Beat Generation (crosslist w/HON 300)
Prof. Deborah Geis
Tues./Thurs. 2:20-3:50 pm
The “Beat Generation” marks a literary and cultural period from the early fifties to the mid-sixties in which rebellion against mainstream American postwar family values was beginning to surface. This interdisciplinary course looks at the literature of this era in its cultural and political contexts, and examines the impact upon subsequent writers and artists. Some of the authors we’ll cover will include “canonical” Beat writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti; Black Beat writers LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Ted Joans, and Bob Kaufman; rebel women Diane DiPrima, Joyce Johnson, Anne Waldman, and Hettie Jones. We will also see some Beat-era films (and representations of “beatniks” in the popular culture of the period) and hear some Beat-era music. Since this course also fulfills DePauw’s “S” requirement, students in this class will be expected to participate actively in speaking and listening activities that will include presentations, performances of texts, and discussions in various modes, both formal and informal.
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