Literature and Writing Topics Course Descriptions

Spring 2010

ENG 277H
Terrorism in Latin American Cinema
Marisela Funes
MWF 2:30-3:35

The concept of terrorism has acquired new meaning in the US since September 11, 2001. Throughout Latin America, however, terrorism has been a constant daily threat since the mid-1940s. In this course we will examine the historical circumstances surrounding terrorism, terrorist organizations and various counterterrorism tactics, and then we will look at their representation in films from Peru, Colombia, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and Uruguay. We will examine local media coverage of events, and discuss how filmmakers and other artists contribute to the dialogue on terrorism, counterterrorism and human rights violations before, during, and after the Cold War. In English, films in Spanish and Portuguese with English subtitles. 

Prerequisite: ENG 100

ENG 377 001
The Sense of Place in British Literature
Misty Beck
WF 12:30-2:00

This course will study “green places” in literature, focusing on Romantic and Post-Romantic British texts, largely from an eco-poetical point of view.  Organized around a series of different kinds of place, the course will explore themes such as “Gardens, Bowers, and Pastoral Idealism,” “Forests of Nostalgia,” “Fields of Memory,” “Humble Dwellings and Spirits of Place,” “Birds, Flowers, and Transient Things,” and “Mountains, Cataracts, and the Sublime Self.”  We will consider how individual works create a sense of place in relation to these themes and what those places embody:  safeguarded self-identity, cultural memory, ethical value, local history, natural history, pastoral beauty, spiritual haven, sublime danger.  Authors may include Marvell, Smith, Bloomfield, D. Wordsworth, W. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Clare, Keats, Shelley, Byron, the Brothers Grimm, Heaney, Boland, Walcott, Jamie. 

Prerequisite:  200-level literature course

ENG 377 002
The Splendid Drunken Twenties
Michael Johnson
Thurs 1:30-4:50

This course will consider the Harlem Renaissance in the larger context of modernism and the culture of the 1920s and will focus particularly on the representation of African Americans in literature, music, and film. The title of the course comes from novelist Carl Van Vechten, but we must remember that the “splendid drunken twenties” were ushered in by the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution (prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcohol) to fully appreciate the irony of the phrase. That Prohibition existed simultaneously with jazz, bathtub gin, and speakeasies is just one of the many paradoxes visible in this period of social, cultural, and technological change in American society, as women for the first time nationally gained the right to vote, as the popularity of African American performers (aided by new technologies such as phonograph records and radios) forever altered the development of American music, as the change from silent film to “talkies” made possible an unprecedented dissemination of black music and black performance, and as the excursions of upper-class white New Yorkers into Harlem began an experiment in integration that created controversy on both sides of the color-line. These changes were part and parcel of the larger social and cultural shifts associated with modernity—and our examination of the artistic and literary responses to modernism will be a central thread of the class.

Silent films screened in the course will include samples of the work of African American director Oscar Micheaux as well as examples of “flapper” and “vamp” films. Writers studied in the course will include Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, and Claude McKay. Members of the class will also participate in a Surrealist Salon, which will be an evening event held at the UMF Gallery.

Prerequisite: 200-level literature course

ENG 377
Philosophy of Language
George Miller
WF 10:00-11:40

In this course we will try to answer a number of questions which arise when we think about language, expression, and understanding, including the following: What is meaning? How is linguistic meaning related to other kinds of meaning, such as perceptual meaning, or the meaning of music, or gestures? What is truth, and how is it achieved? Does a given text have a definite meaning, or is meaning inescapably indeterminate? What does understanding a text amount to? Readings will include selections from Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, and many others.  (Cross-listed as PHI 377.)

Prerequisite: 200-level literature course or any PHI course

ENG 477 001
American Captivity Narratives from Colonial Times to the Space Age: Experience, Nationhood, and Identities
Sabine Klein
W 2:30-5:35

For the last 50 years, scholars have linked the rise of American literature to the emergence of the Indian captivity narrative in seventeenth-century New England. In this colonial genre, a white woman is abducted by Native Americans with whom she journeys through America's wilderness. After regaining her freedom, her experiences have challenged her understanding of her self, her community, her nation, and her enemies. Often published, these narratives played an important role in the formation of colonial communities. Interestingly, captivity narratives continue to play an important role in colonial and national literatures for the following centuries in slave narratives, stories about prisoners of war, and narratives of alien captivity, e.g. in Star Wars. In this course, we will study how the genre develops from colonial times to the present and how it has been discussed in literary and historical scholarship.

Prerequisite: 300-level literature course

Winter 2009-10

ENG 277H 001
Environmental Writing in Costa Rica
Jeffrey Thomson
Travel Course: January 4-15

For two weeks, we will explore the astonishing diversity of many of Costa Rica’s ecosystems, including rain forests, cloud forests, dry forests, mangrove swamps, and beach ecosystems.  The course will emphasize natural history, ecological patterns, tropical conservation, and reflecting on and writing about your experiences.  Students will write and reflect on their experiences in poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction and develop a portfolio of written work that will be revised and developed upon their return to UMF.

ENG 277H 002
Gay and Lesbian Literature
Gretchen Legler
December 28-January 15

Our aspirations in this course will be simple: to read and discuss gay & lesbian literature.  The books for this course cover four different literature genres: fiction, memoir, poetry, and drama.  Our reading will be arranged chronologically, starting with the verse of the ancient Greek poet Sappho, who lived on the Isle of Lesbos, and from whom the word lesbian came, and ending with Rigoberto Gonzalez, whose memoir Butterfly Boy represents some of the best contemporary gay writing.  We will read these works as pieces of literature and will analyze them accordingly, but we will also be researching and talking about gay and lesbian history, culture, and politics as a way of providing a context for our understanding of how these works gives voice to gay and lesbian life.  This course could be called “Comparative Studies in Gay & Lesbian Literature and Culture.”

May 2010

ENG 277H 001
Have a Good Cry: Gender and Hollywood Melodrama
Ann Kennedy
May 17-June 11

Often referred to as tearjerkers, Hollywood melodramas have traditionally been produced and marketed for a female audience.  In this course, we will begin by looking at the origins of melodrama and trace how definitions of the genre have changed over time.  Our primary focus will be mainstream U.S. fi9lms from the 1930s to the present, including classics such as Imitation of Life, Stella Dallas, Terms of Endearment, and more recent films such as Stepmom.  We will study how and why they became known as “women’s films,” who exactly is the “woman” imagined as the primary audience for the films, what ideas about masculinity and femininity are produced within these films, how those ideas are shaped by race, sexuality, and class, and how those ideas have changed as U.S. culture has changed.  In addition to viewing the films, we will read reviews of the films, theories of melodrama and gender, and specific analyses of each film. 

Prerequisite: ENG 100 or permission of instructor.

ENG 277H 002
Nature Writing: A Field Course
Gretchen Legler
May 17-June 11
Field Trip to Acadia National Park June 4-8

Get out of the classroom and into nature!  If you want to learn how to be a better creative writer and you like the outdoors, this course is for you.  Students ill learn basic writing skills including attention to detail, the importance of using the five senses, how to build a scene, how to organize a narrative, and how to write dense and provocative description.  We’ll focus on how to write about the natural world and your place in it and will spend a great deal of our time in the field—on mountaintops and lakes, in the woods and on the coast.  If you are a creative writing major, a natural science major, need an exciting way to earn some extra credits, or just want to improve your writing skills, come join us. 

This course is a field course and will be held both in the classroom on campus and away form campus in outdoor locations.  Daylong trips will be part of the cours4e, as will a five-day stay at the Schoodic Education and Research Center facility in Academia National Park.  No special outdoor skills or experience are necessary.

Prerequisite:  ENG 100 or an equivalent.

This course will count toward a Creative Writing major (the equivalent of ENG 212), and as a Humanities General Education requirement.

ENG 377H 001
The Art of Detection: Nineteenth Century Detective Fiction
Misty Beck
May 17-June 10

This course explores detective fiction from its origins in early nineteenth-century crime reporting to its full realization in the Sherlock Holmes stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  We pay special attention to detective fiction’s treatment of crime, a phenomenon this literature often linked to the social problems of imperialism, urbanization, and mass culture, and to the emergence of new gender and sexual identities.  In addition to Doyle, we will study authors such as Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wllkie Collins, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Tom Gallon, and Marie Belloc Loundes.

Prerequisite: 200-level literature course

Summer 2010

ENG 277H 003
Wilderness in Literature and Film
Misty Beck
June 28-July 23

“Wilderness in Literature and Film” examines how wilderness has been represented in selected works of prose, poetry, and film.  We will trace the conceptualization of wilderness in literature as it changes from a place of loathing to one of longing, and we will explore how it materializes in myths of individual character, national destiny, cultural cohesion, and personal longing.  Our readings will feature selections from authors such as Wordsworth, Thoreau, Abbey, Dillard, Maclean, Snyder, Oliver, Krakauer, Heaney, Kunitz.  We will also explore how the medium of film communicates ways of understanding wilderness in genres such as memoir (As A River Runs Through it), mythic folktales (Sansho the Bailiff), documentary-drama (Into the Wild) and suspense (The Birds).

Prerequisite: ENG 100