Course Schedule Spring 2025 - Cloned

English 10B offers a survey of literature in English from 1700-1900, and is the second part of the required ENL 10 sequence for English majors. Our focus in this class will be on literature written between 1700 and 1900 in the English-speaking world. This is a reading and writing intensive class, designed to improve your critical reading and critical writing abilities and to prepare you for upper-division courses in the major. Our key goals for the class are:

• To improve your skills in close reading, attention to textual detail, and reading texts within a historical context
• To introduce you to some of the most important literary and cultural developments in the English-speaking world from 1700 to 1900
• To explore a wide range of genres, modes, and forms of literary writing
• To strengthen your writing and research skills generally and to give you practice in writing literary analysis and research papers for the English major

Some of the topics we will explore in this class include: transatlantic print culture, the rise of the novel, forms of autobiography, Gothic and Romantic literature, the globalization of English literary forms, early science fiction, and literature’s relation to major historical contexts such as nationhood, colonialism, slavery, the Industrial Revolution, and the changing natural world. Assignments will include frequent in-class writing exercises, two papers, class participation and attendance, and an in-class final exam.

In this course, we will be engaging with some of the seminal works of John Milton, including Paradise Lost and a sample of his early poetry and prose. Our way of reading will explore the built environment of the story as poem: its sound, its verse, its rhetoric, and its characters. We will be particularly attentive to the worlding (that is the world building) that the language of the poem enacts. Simultaneously, we will be exploring the poem as story by noting its origins, atmosphere, and climate environs. We will follow its crosshatching of multiple worlds and life forms—including human beings, vegetal, mineral, animal, and more-than-human entities—as they traverse space and time. We will be attentive to how matter, energy, information, and physical laws or cosmology, as well as religious views, constrain and construct domains. We will also examine Milton’s unconventional representations of creation, the natural world, and human systems such as justice and government. As we read, we will ask what it means to be human and how the stories we tell might create interpenetrating dimensions, alternate planes, and potential futures.

Required Text: Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Edited, with Introduction, by David Scott Kastan. Hackett, 2005. ISBN 978-0-87220-733-2.

General Education: Arts & Humanities (AH); Writing Experience (WE).

Shakespeare and New Technologies: From AI to VR

This course examines how recent technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) are shaping Shakespeare’s delivery to 21st century audiences. We will read about and, when possible, explore first-hand Shakespeare projects that employ VR, AI, and related technologies alongside Shakespeare plays that are the focus of these projects, including The Tempest and Hamlet. What are the limitations and affordances of recent technologies for reimagining Shakespeare in the 21st century? To what extent do these technologies help us gain new insights into Shakespeare’s plays? How are experiments with new technologies changing more traditional ways of experiencing Shakespeare in classrooms, theaters, popular media, and public spaces? Are these changes beneficial and, if so, for whom and why?

One aim of the course is to offer students interested in early modern drama an opportunity to learn more about a hot topic in the field of the Shakespeare studies. An additional aim is to help students think about how a passion for Shakespeare could be channeled into career paths where new digital technologies have been gaining traction: K-12 teaching, theatre production, game-making, and academic scholarship. To that end, students will focus their term project on a career path that most interests them. For instance, those on a teaching path might create course materials for teaching Shakespeare with new technologies; those on a game-making path might prototype a game designed to be played using one of these technologies; those on a theatre path might write a pitch for a theatre production that uses a particular technology to adapt a Shakespeare play; those on a scholarship track might write a research essay examining one or more digital Shakespeare projects.

Students do not need any background or familiarity with VR, AI, and other digital technologies in order to take this course. They just need to be open to experimenting with them.

M 12:10-15:00 120 VRHIES