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International Education
The English Department offers several unique courses through the University's International Education Program. This year we will be offering programs in Jamaica, London, Dublin, and France. Below is a peak of some of the Summer 2008 offerings. For lists of courses offered in previous years, click here.
Check back reguarly for updated offerings.
Study Abroad in Jamaica
May 12 – 28, 2008
English 496/596: Caribbean Studies (Pierce)
There are two major aims for this course, the first of which is to introduce students to Caribbean literature. Not only will students learn about particular political and social histories informing the literature, they will have the rare opportunity to read the literature in its cultural context. In this trip abroad, we will experience the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes described in the literature we study—from the local flora, fauna, and produce, to the regional dialect often depicted in various texts, we will gain a unique understanding of the literature of the Caribbean.
The second aim for the course brings in critical theories on travel and tourism, applicable to the literature and to our own lives as well. We will engage with difficult and often confusing ideas, such as the stereotype of the “ugly American,” and we will grapple with the question of (and possibility for) responsible tourism. This part of the course asks the vital question: how do we/ can we/ should we represent ourselves as global travelers—whether venturing to “remote locations,” “popular vacation destinations,” and/or “developing countries”? We will problematize even commonly accepted tourism terminology itself, and explore the possibility of becoming what Maxine Feifer and John Urry describe as the “post-tourist,” or the self-conscious traveler in the age of global technology. Finally, we will put theory into practice as we venture into unknown terrain as the student/tourist, reflecting on and engaging with the complicated theories of literature and life.
Study Abroad in London/Dublin
Summer 2008 (Exact Dates TBA)
British Studies (Mays)
“When a man is tired of London,” Samuel Johnson remarked, famously, “he is tired of life. For there is in London all that life can afford.” Throughout the ages—both long before Johnson and long since—it is this sense of London as a compendium of human life that has fascinated and charmed writers as diverse as Chaucer and Shakespeare, Blake and Dickens, Conrad and Woolf. For these writers and scores of others, London has served as both subject and seemingly limitless fount of literary creativity. Through works such as Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Conrad’s The Secret Agent, H.G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, this class will explore literary representations of London as the world center of arts, commerce, politics, and finance that it has been now for many centuries. From 7 Baker Street, to the Dickens Pub, to Greenwich, and Shakespeare’s recreated Globe Theatre, we will canvass the nooks and crannies, the boulevards and alleyways that constitute one of the great cosmopolitan world cities. Just as London has served as a magnet for writers from across the globe, however, it has just as often served as foil for writers closer to home. And in this regard, a second focus of the course will be on the love/hate relationship towards the great city as experienced by numerous Irish writers, including Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, and W.B. Yeats. Following field trips, lectures, and site-visits around London and its environs, the course will conclude with four days in Dublin, following the trail of Joyce’s Ulysses, the Georgian squares of Yeats’s poetry, and the still-vital Irish National Theatre, the Abbey.
ENG 597: British Studies (Lares)
This course will explore British children’s literature in its rich historical and geographical context. Course activities will combine the reading of literary classics with visits to the actual places which generated them and with presentations on various aspects of literature by noted British specialists. Speakers in former years have included such well-known figures as Brian Alderson, Mary Cadogan, Jenni Calder, Pat Pinsent, Brian Sibley, Gillian Spraggs, Ann Thwaite, and Nigel Wood. We will visit fantasy sites in Oxford associated with Lewis Carroll, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and more recently with Harry Potter; cross Pooh Bridge in Milne’s Ashdown Forest; find traces of Long John Silver in Stevenson’s Edinburgh; and look for Peter Rabbit in Potter’s Lake District. In London, we will explore the appeal of Dick Whittington to city apprentices four hundred years earlier; walk about the maritime world of Greenwich Village and think of Jim Hawkins sailing to Treasure Island, visit the Old Royal Observatory and experience a child’s wonder of having a foot in each hemisphere at the Greenwich Meridian, and see Kensington Garden to understand how J. M. Barrie could find Peter Pan in the magical park across the street. Throughout, we will look at how various texts are constructed as literature and how they reflect historical, cultural and psychological realities. Although the course will be organized around a literary understanding of the texts, we will also look some to the fields of education, bibliography, and entertainment.
Study Abroad in France
June 8 - June 29, 2008
The Abbey Writers’ Workshop: A Summer Salon for Poetry, Fiction and Songwriting in France’s Loire Valley
France has always been among the world’s most vital and dynamic stages for politics, culture, business and the arts. And nothing today suggests that this country and its citizens stand ready to give up their time-honored spot at the heart of what so many of us might say are our dreams of a creative and inspired life. Since the 18th century’s most notable political and cultural leaders all went there to live, learn, argue politics and make money, France has welcomed countless would-be Thomas Jeffersons, Pablo Piccasos and Ernest Hemingways who have come to it seeking variously sentimental, artistic and political educations. Is it that this country and its people have a secret about living artfully well that a quick glance cannot uncover but that deeper scrutiny can? Perhaps it is that the simple dreams of small-town living in France strikes anyone who does it for a while as qualitatively different from the same existence elsewhere? Or maybe it is the surging energy surrounding Paris and its celebrated avenues, storied river and majestic monuments that pulls us to its highly charged heart? Whatever takes us there and asks us to embrace its tiny towns and great urban sites, France is waiting to be your muse and platform for creative growth.
The Abbey Writers’ Workshop will feature three courses devoted to creative writing and expression. With top faculty guiding you in the areas of poetry, fiction and songwriting, your creative insights will be honed as you find new inspiration in a new country. Based for two weeks at the historic Abbey of Pontlevoy in the historic center of the French Loire Valley, the the AWW will use magnificent gardens, legendary cathedrals, and the tranquility of a 1000 year old village to inspire you. Then, as you take a few days for travel on your own and wind your way to nearly a week in the pulsing center of Paris, your work as a writer will continue to grow and be challenged by the sites you see, the faculty you have to mentor you and the special salon of other gifted students whose work will become dear to you indeed.
Study in New York
June 25-July 25, 2008
ENG 589: Studies in American Literature (Tribunella)
New York has become virtually synonymous with the United States through its
importance to the immigrant experience, its status as a center of business and
commerce, its symbolic embodiment of technological progress, its cultivation of
cultural diversity, its fermentation of social and sexual revolutions, and its
central role in American literary history and production. New York is the
literary city of the United States. Many of the nation’s most prominent
writers have either lived in or passed through this iconic city. In this
course we will study a range of texts and authors that imagine New York City,
and we will investigate the role the city has played in American literature and
culture. The list of surveyed authors might include Walt Whitman, Herman
Melville, Horatio Alger, Hart Crane, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Nella Larsen,
Langston Hughes, John Dos Passos, Edna St. Vincent Millay, James Baldwin, Allen
Ginsburg, J.D. Salinger, E.L. Konigsburg, and Tony Kushner. We will travel to
New York and experience the city firsthand, visiting the sites related to the
course texts and authors, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Central
Park, Harlem, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Greenwich
Village, Times Square, the Tenement Museum, Wall Street, and the Museum of
Natural History. Students will have the opportunity to explore the city and to
partake of its literary and cultural offerings by attending poetry readings,
seeing plays, or visiting archives. Students will also have the opportunity to
research their individual interests in a variety of topics, from the Harlem
Renaissance to the Beat generation, from gay literature to children’s
literature.
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