Intro to English Studies

ENG 320—Introduction to English Studies (DL)

Spring 2021 / TR 9 – 10:15 / Synchronous online

Instructor: Ruth Y. Hsu (rhsu@hawaii.edu)

This course will be an online, synchronous course (we will meet as a whole class twice a week, at the designated time and day and via zoom). Additionally, every two or three weeks, we will meet in one-on-one consultations via zoom to go over your writing and your thoughts about the required reading.

This is a crucial course in terms of the content, and your writing, reading, and analytical skills. See Student Learning Outcomes below. Contact me if you have questions regarding the format of this class or the procedure.

Description, goals:

This course is designed to strengthen, deepen, and expand your capacity to analyze, to write about, and to discuss literary and cultural texts. One portion of the reading list consists of novellas, drama, film, graphic narratives, and memoirs. Another category of texts consists of scholars writing about literary and cultural texts from different methodological stances, such as poststructuralism, Marxian criticism, feminisms, or postcolonial theory. Introducing you to various analytical frameworks is a means of introducing you to literary and cultural studies as a discipline with its own history and ways of perceiving society, the environment, humans and non-humans, animate and non-animate presences. A third category of reading concerns studying how we can compose persuasive and compelling writing—formal, or more casual, or creative pieces about literature, culture, and literary criticism–in our overlapping roles of reader, thinker, writer, critic and scholar. Together, we will be undertaking careful and detailed analyses of all assigned texts. I will provide written feedback on your writing and oral presentation.

Required texts:

Drama:  Alani Apio, Kāmau and Kāmau A‘e; William Shakespeare, The Tempest

Film:    Beasts of the Southern Wild

Graphic Narrative:  Chris Ware, Rusty Brown

Podcast (True crime):   Serial; Thunder Bay

Prose fiction:    Margaret Atwood, Hag-Seed: William Shakespeare’s The Tempest Retold; J.M. Coetzee, Foe; Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

Literary Criticism: Lois Tyson, Using Critical Theory; Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (selection)

Requirements: Bi-weekly Forum posts (each post must be 300-350 words); one class presentations (5 to 10 minutes); a final essay exam (take-home; must include pre-writing). All components of all writing and course assignments must be completed in order for you to pass the class.

Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs):

  1. Students will strengthen their ability to analyze, to write about, to discuss literary and cultural texts and literary criticism;
  2. Students will improve their ability to use a broad range of terminology in literary and cultural studies, including terms and concepts associated with specific analytical frameworks;
  3. Students will improve their ability to put together persuasive and analytical papers in an academic setting, including the techniques of paraphrasing, introducing quotations, and the appropriate use of citation styles;
  4. Students will be able to situate literary, cultural, and scholarly texts within larger historical and political debates about the purposes of class, gender, racial, and ethnic identity categories, and the discourse of national literatures and of aesthetics.