18th Century and More with Professor Seavey

Michel de Montaigne

GW Students!  Professor Ormond Seavey's courses for spring afford some great opportunities for exposing yourself to a wide range of literature, from its early American beginnings to the classic Education of Henry Adams, published in 1907.

English 3490 Early American Literature and Culture

CRN: 43931, Tue/Thur 3:45-5 PM

Beginning with a Shakespeare text which represents a bridge between the turbulent early modern period in Europe from which Renaissance literature emerged and the domain of uncertainty of the New World, this course considers some of the imaginative costs and benefits of the Euro-African settlement of the Americas between the beginning of the seventeenth century and the end of the eighteenth century.  It is a story filled with problems, accommodations, excuses, and conflicts, with some suggestive successes mixed in.  Although this course deals to an extent with historical materials, its approach is a literary one, assuming that careful interpretive distinctions of the sort used to reveal the meanings of poetry and fiction are needed to answer the most interesting historical questions. 

English 3810.12 Special Topics: Politics, Skepticism, and Literature

CRN: 45497, Tue/Thur 11:10-12:25 AM

Skepticism, the ironic approach to existence, coexists somewhat uncomfortably with the activities of politics, but skeptical approaches to public and personal life emerge in the early modern period with the writings of Erasmus and Montaigne.  In the Eighteenth Century as irony comes to its richest appearance, it can be seen in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travelsand even in the historical writings of Gibbon.  Turning to the American Nineteenth Century, an era when skepticism tended to be discounted as an adequate approach to experience, Emerson revisits Montaigne’s Essays in an effort to incorporate skepticism into an aspect of idealizing affirmation.  The course moves toward the profound negations of Henry Adams, a figure carefully spraddling domains of imaginative expression and public life in Washington, with his Education of Henry Adams. 

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Politics, Sex, Sentiment! (And a fulfilled GPAC Oral Requirement)

Hogarth, Beggar's Opera

GW Students: another class to consider for Spring 2015.  This class now fulfills the GPAC Oral Requirement.

The Eighteenth Century:  The Theatre of Politics, Sex, and Sentiment

Professor Tara G. Wallace

CRN: 47695

Tuesday-Thursday 9:35-10:50 AM

In 1660, after two decades of Puritan rule, England regained its monarchy and its theatres, and both court and stage enthusiastically embraced the spirit of liberty enabled by the new regime under Charles II, the Merry Monarch.  Theatrical productions took advantage of technological innovations and the availability, for the first time, of actresses to play female roles … and the modern theatre was born.

This course looks at a selection of playtexts produced during the long 18^th century (1660-1800), considering both ‘literary’ elements and the cultural information the plays convey.  We will trace the movement from libertinism to sentimentalism, and discuss the culture wars enacted on the 18^th-century stage in plays such as Congreve’s The Way of the World, Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, and Shridan’s The Rivals.

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Toni Morrison and William Faulkner: Race, Memory and Aesthetics

GW Students: Another great course for Spring 2015! Study Toni Morrison and William Faulkner with Professor Evelyn Schreiber (president of the Toni Morrison Society).

English 3820W.10, CRN 42671, "William Faulkner and Toni Morrison:  Race, Memory, and Aesthetics"

Major Authors: Toni Morrison and William Faulkner: "Race, Memory, and Aesthetics" : This course links authors Toni Morrison and William Faulkner through the ways in which their fictional and discursive practices reflect on each other.  Specifically, we will examine how the texts of both authors reenact and resist racism and patriarchal structures; how they explore the ways in which memory and the past construct identity; and how they experiment with style.  We will consider the ways in which the texts illuminate a continuum in American literature through discussions of socially constructed identity and issues of race, class, and gender.  In addition, the class utilizes cultural studies and psychoanalytic critical approaches to the texts of these authors.  The reading list includes Beloved, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Absalom, Absalom!, The Sound and the Fury, and Light in August.

This course fulfills the Minority or Postcolonial Literatures (d) requirement for English Majors.

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The Cultural Memory of Slavery in Literature and Film

GW Students!  We'll be featuring a few of our Spring 2015 courses here over the next week.  Consider signing up for English 3570: The Cultural Memory of Slavery in Literature and Film, taught by Professor Jennifer James.  The CRN is 48139, TR 2:20-3:35.

 The upcoming two hundred-year anniversary of the end of the Civil War has renewed debates about our nation’s complex relationship to the history of slavery. The recent success of major theatrical films about enslavement has given new urgency to enduring questions about the relationship of art to cultural memory. Can a traumatic event like slavery ever be captured in literature, film or other art forms? What can art accomplish that history “proper” can not? Who has the “right” to depict that history? How do artists explain their need to take on this difficult subject? To think through these and other questions, we will read a variety of literature beginning with 19th century slave narratives and ending with examples of 20th century neo-slave novels, such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Octavia Butler's Afrofuturist novel, Kindred and Edward P. Jones' The Known World. Selected films will include Django Unchained, Lincoln, Twelve Years a Slave, Jefferson in Paris and Sankofa. 

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