Advanced Seminar
Prerequisite: Junior standing.
This course is required of all English majors. It offers an advanced, intensive study of a period, author, genre, theme or critical issue in a seminar setting. Topics are announced when the course is offered.
Outcomes: Students will be able to recognize the ways that the subject matter of the seminar relates to the production, representation, and interpretation of artistic culture.
Prerequisite: Junior standing.
This course is required of all English majors. It offers an advanced, intensive study of a period, author, genre, theme or critical issue in a seminar setting. Topics are announced when the course is offered.
Outcomes: Students will be able to recognize the ways that the subject matter of the seminar relates to the production, representation, and interpretation of artistic culture.
Department Consent Required
Pre-requisites: UCWR 110 and one 200-level English course.
This is a writing intensive class.
The Seasons of Dickinson's Desk
Between 1854 and 1886 Dickinson composed more than 1800 poems and 1050 letters along with fragments in prose and verse. From her desk¿at once an 18 x 18 inch square cherry writing table and the infinite space of her mind¿she engaged the world, composing work for readers as near as a hedgerow away and as far as another time/world. In this seminar, ¿The Seasons of Dickinson¿s Desk,¿ participants will be drawn into the material, social and literary structures of Dickinson¿s poetry, letters and fragments by first exploring the scope and trajectory of her writings and then by engaging these writings by intellectually imagining and re-creating Dickinson¿s desk and the trajectories of its activities in and across time. Working individually and collaboratively, seminar participants will gather and interpret the many materials¿flower specimens and seeds Dickinson was studying, books and periodicals she was reading, letters she received from others, and poems and letters she was composing¿that lay upon her the desk in a given time frame. By transforming Dickinson¿s desk from a static object into an animate scene of production, participants will illuminate the temporal and deeply layered nature of literary production as well as the complex relations between message, medium and culture.
Class Details
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