ENG 110 - English Literature And Its Contexts

Dates: 05/17/2021 - 06/11/2021

Building: Online, contact instructor

Instructor Name: Katherine Ellison

Class Notes: This online summer 2021 course combines the lecture mode – you listen, think, take notes, and learn – with discussion posts to introduce the literatures written in England, from the earliest literary texts to recent slam poems that challenge the entire notion of a literary tradition and who has been allowed in it. Guided by Dr. Katherine Ellison, this historically grounded course will think in terms of who has been included in the stories of British literary history, who has been left out, and why. We will consider shifting notions of “Englishness” and the place of “Englishness” in the cultural and literary world. While we sketch in broad terms a cultural and political history, we will trace the construction of notions of class, race, gender, and sexuality. As readers of texts and, for many of you, as future teachers of “literature,” we will consider our ethical responsibilities as educators and purveyors of cultural traditions.

Dates: 06/28/2021 - 08/06/2021

Building: Online, contact instructor

Instructor Name: Brian Rejack

Class Notes: This survey of English literature will approach literary history with a focus on transmission and communication. By these terms I mean both cultural transmission (how texts and other carriers of culture continue to move through history) and more material forms of contact, as in the case of the plagues in the background of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and in the foreground of Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year—I’ve taught this course with this focus for a few years now, but the current pandemic obviously provides us with an additional and, sadly, all-too-relevant contemporary context. Our approach will stress the significance of attending to how cultural materials are produced, preserved, and spread in order to make sense of what those cultural materials mean.

Dates: 08/16/2021 - 12/04/2021

Building: Adlai E. Stevenson Hall 212 (STV 212)

Instructor Name: Tara Lyons

Textbooks have not been finalized for section.

Dates: 08/16/2021 - 12/04/2021

Building: Adlai E. Stevenson Hall 436 (STV 436)

Instructor Name: Tara Lyons

Textbooks have not been finalized for section.