:: Jill Magi
::
This course is designed to introduce students to literature and art, literary studies, and academic writing. Focusing on longer works from a variety of genres and historical periods, the course allows students to further refine methods of critical writing and reading. The course emphasizes writing skills and practices, close textual and visual analysis, and investigations of the cultural and historical contexts of literary and artistic works.
Broadly stated, the course should instill or deepen in students the love of language, the desire to write and read, and the recognition of the importance of storytelling and art in our lives and the lives of those who´ve lived before us. Students should also emerge from the course having a deeper understanding of the history of ideas and the role of art in representing and informing that history.
Course Schedule
Week One: Storytelling: An Introduction to Literature and Writing / History and Background to The Odyssey
Week Two: Heroes: Odysseus and Penelope
Week Three: Gods and Humans
Week Four: Storytelling Structures, Literary Devices, Plot
Week Five: Draft of paper #1 is due (required)
Week Six: Introduction to Shakespeare and Modern English / The Renaissance / The SonnetÑfrom Shakespeare to Wanda Coleman
Week Seven: Day/Night, Island/Mainland, Good/Evil, Foreign/Native in Othello
Week Eight: Who´s the Hero Now?: A Character Study of Iago
Week Nine: Introduction to film analysis / watch Oliver Parker´s version of Othello
Week Ten: watch Welles´ version of Othello / Discuss visual representations in both films
Week Eleven: Lecture: The Enlightenment to Modernism / A history of the novel / background on Zora Neale Hurston
Week Twelve: Guest Speaker: Warren Orange on African-American Migration and the History of Post-Reconstruction South
Week Thirteen: Janie Crawford and Odysseus / Nature, the porch, hair, class, and silence in Their Eyes Were Watching God
Week Fourteen: Literary/artistic movements: The Harlem Renaissance / The Black Arts Movement / Contemporary Post-colonial Poetry
Week Fifteen: Final Paper is due / Self-assessment essay is due