ENGL 119
Missed Encounters Spring 2014
Division I Writing Skills Exploring Diversity Initiative
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

Although we attempt to engage directly those who are personally and culturally alien, such exchanges remain inseparable from our fantasies of otherness. Those fantasies can be as reductive as a stereotype, but they can also be enormously nuanced and self-revealing, as rich as literature itself. We will study the missed encounter–the encounter in which the element of presupposition and fantasy is vividly apparent–in cultural contexts from the first English accounts of the inhabitants of Virginia to race relations in contemporary African fiction; we will consider such encounters in other contexts as well, including sexual relations, the relations between young and old, even the relation between past and present. But in every case, we will look with an eye toward what such events tell us about the nature of fantasy. The course will consider novels, drama, film, opera, and non-fiction works, perhaps including: Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians; Harriot, “Report of the New Found Land of Virginia”; Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Crane, “The Blue Hotel”; Gordimer, The Pick Up; Herzog, Aguirre; Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet or Othello; Puccini, Madame Butterfly; Huang, M. Butterfly and Austen, Pride and Prejudice. The course reflects the aims of the Diversity Initiative insofar as it encourages self-consciousness about cultural difference and the role of representation in cultural knowledge.
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 19
Expected: 19
Class#: 3646
Grading: yes pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: active class participation, and frequent papers totaling 20 pages
Prerequisites: none
Enrollment Preferences: first-year students who have not taken or placed out of a 100-level English course
Distributions: Division I Writing Skills Exploring Diversity Initiative

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