ENG 465/001 – BRITISH LITERATURE AND THE DISSOLUTION OF EMP
M/W 11:45 AM – 1:00 PM
Instructor: Jon F Thompson
British Lit Since 1945
The end of World War II also effectively signaled the end of the British Empire, which had its origins in the establishment of English plantations in Ireland in the sixteenth century. The end of empire precipitated an intense interrogation of British identity: if being British was no longer based upon being “great”—“Great Britain”—what was it based on? What did it mean to be British? Was there such a thing as a national identity at all—or did the break-up mean were there only smaller national identities like England, Scotland and Wales? While the end of empire brought about a political identity crisis, it also seemed to invigorate British literature inasmuch as the postwar years witnessed a huge upswelling of adventurous literary production, often by writers with ties to the former “colonies.” So: new voices, new forms, newly-rendered experiences, new ways of writing novels, experimentation, risk-taking, renewed interest in genre fiction and pop culture, some taboo subjects, not to mention liberal amounts of terror, pleasure, humor and the grotesque. Writers will include Graham Greene, Angela Carter, Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie, Peter Riley, Ian McEwan, Pat Barker, Penelope Fitzgerald, Ted Hughes and Martin Anderson. There will be a midterm and a final exam and two out-of-class essays.
ENG 495 – STUDIES IN LITERATURE
T/TH 10:15 AM – 11:30 AM
Instructor: W J Miller
Langston Hughes: From Popular Culture to the Civil Rights Movement
Langston Hughes (1901-1967) absorbed and shaped popular culture noting that his greatest source of inspiration was listening to (or reading) the news. In shaping both Harlem’s values and the social turmoil of the 1960s, this seminar reassess this writer whose career merely begins with his role as a leading figure of the New Negro Movement of the 1920s.
Accessing numerous primary sources as well as engaging with extensive works from Hughes’s seventeen-volume oeuvre, this course examines Hughes’s use of popular blues and jazz music to shape the rhythms and cadence of his innovative poetry. Despite (or perhaps because of?) their blues influence, many of Hughes’s poems read like rehearsals for social change. We will then continue on through his dramatic works, track his influence on Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), and move into his weekly newspaper columns written for the Chicago Defender from 1942-62. Final projects for this course might explore such questions as What role did communism play in the life of this writer who was forced to testify on television before Joseph McCarthy in 1953 at the height of the Red Scare? Of special note, this seminar begins and ends with extended exploration into the previously unidentified role Hughes’s poetry played in the Civil Rights Movement and its direct inspiration on the nation’s most visible dreamer— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.