ENGL 110
American Love Stories
Spring 2013
(also offered Fall 2012)
Division I
Writing Skills
This is not the current course catalog
Class Details
It’s been argued that American writers don’t know how to tell a happy love story. Instead of ending a tale with the payoff of a wedding, or writing about the joys of family life, they obsess over loneliness, death, and escape from civilization. In this class, we will collectively test and revamp that thesis, constructing an informal history of love over a century of American imaginings. What is the symbolic value of marriage in a country with a stated aim to achieve a more perfect union (a question we’ll see played out in the film )? How do some of our great authors try to convey the nature of desire? What, for instance, makes Daisy in The Great Gatsby, or Poe’s dark-eyed heroine in “Ligeia,” so alluring? And we’ll consider extramarital forms of attachment, from the ties that bind “frenemies” (like Chillingworth and Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter) to the tender care people lavish on the things they collect (as in Mary Wilkins Freeman’s “A New England Nun“).
The Class:
Format: seminar
Limit: 19
Expected: 19
Class#: 3943
Grading: yes pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Limit: 19
Expected: 19
Class#: 3943
Grading: yes pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation:
active class participation and 4 essays totaling at least 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
Class Grid
-
HEADERS
Column header 1
CLASSESColumn header 2DREQColumn header 3INSTRUCTORSColumn header 4TIMESColumn header 5CLASS#
-
ENGL 110 - 01 (S) SEM American Love Stories
ENGL 110 - 01 (S) SEM American Love StoriesDivision I Writing SkillsAshley C. BarnesTR 8:30 am - 9:45 am
Schapiro Hall 1413943
Megamenu Social