Course Description:

English 460 Senior Seminar: Current Issues in English is a culminating course in English studies which asks senior students in English to examine current issues in the discipline which affect creativity, scholarship and pedagogy and to discuss them with other future writers, teachers, critics, and scholars. The issues chosen to be addressed in the course are pertinent to anyone graduating in English, regardless of their subdiscipline or special interests. The object of the course is to provide an opportunity for students

• to bring together the various elements of their study of English language and literature and

• to demonstrate both their knowledge and their skills in applying their knowledge.

Senior students will:

• research a self-selected area of the course focus with the advice and approval of the course instructor;

• create a major paper on topics of their choosing within the focus of the course that clearly demonstrates their mastery of relevant elements of English studies and of appropriate research tools, analytical skills, and writing ability;

• give twenty-minute oral presentations of their research in front of an audience; and,

• submit the paper to the class members and instructor for guidance in revision for the presentation and for the final preparation of a presentation text.

The teacher will help the students pick the topic, conduct the research, draft and revise the paper, prepare for the presentation, participate in the seminar workshops, and prepare the final presentation text of the paper.

This semester this section of the senior seminar will study current issues related to the adaptation and intertextuality of literary texts. Literary texts--novels, plays, poems--are often the sources for adaptation into other media: theater, film, television, music, dance, illustrated texts. Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet, for example, was itself an adaptation of an Italian novella, adapted into a form for Elizabethan theater, and it has not only been performed in the theater and adapted as a screenplay and filmed (sometimes altering the setting and era), but has also been adapted as musical comedy (West Side Story), ballet, opera, and martial arts film. Literary texts also inspire other literary texts, either directly (as Euripides's Hippolytus inspired Racine's Phaedra and O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms, or Plautus's The Meneachmi Twins inspired Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors which in turn inspired the Rodgers and Hart musical The Boys From Syracuse) or tangentially (as Shakespeare's Othello is the basis of the film A Double Life, in which an actor playing Othello begins to believe that his actress-wife playing Desdemona is unfaithful or as Euripides' Medea is the basis for the film A Dream of Passion, in which an actress playing Medea is haunted by her meeting with a modern woman who actually did kill her children or as Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew is the basis for the musical Kiss Me Kate, about a squabbling theatrical couple playing Petruchio and Kate).  In other words a very large portion of the books we read and the films and theater we see is drawn from other literary works in one way or another. This tendency toward adaptation and intertextuality is the Current Issue the entire class will be engaged in exploring and explaining this semester.

Students will be expected to exhibit advanced skills in research, oral presentation, and writing through the following required work:

A) An Issues Journal

Students will respond and reflect on required and self-selected readings from course texts, handouts, and materials on reserve in the library. Journal entries will address personal issues of literacy acquisition, maintenance, and use as well as more general theoretical and practical issues.

B) A Researched Paper on Adaptation or Intertextuality

Each student will be required to write a ten to fifteen page paper on a topic of his/her choosing related to the focus of the course. The paper should draw upon current research in the area of adaptation and intertextuality and synthesize that research in the service of a clear, unified, thoroughly developed, and well-organized application of these ideas to a specific exploration of two or three comparative works. This paper will be presented in draft to the entire class for critiquing and revision advice and form the nucleus of a public presentation on this topic (see below).

C) A Formal Presentation

All students in the course will be asked to prepare their work-in-progress for a formal presentation to students outside the class, as part of a day long student research conference. Presentations should run no more than twenty minutes and presenters should also be prepared to answer questions from the audience regarding the topic of the presentation.

D) Participation in Class Discussion and Workshops

After several weeks of grounding ourselves in the topic the central portion of the course will consist of workshops in which students will work with one another on work-in-progress for the paper and presentation.  Students will be expected to engage in the various in-class multigenre activities, advise each other in workshop, comment on each other's presentations at the end of the course.

E) A Final Examination

The Final Examination will be an opportunity to draw together each student's thinking about the issues of the course and the specific texts encountered in their own and other students' research.

Textbooks:

• Coen, Joel, and Ethan Coen. O Brother Where Art Thou? New York: Faber and Faber, 2000.
• Cunningham, Michael. The Hours. New York: Picador USA, 2000.
• Norman, Marc, and Tom Stoppard. Shakespeare in Love: A Screenplay. New York: Hyperion, 1998.
• Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1981.

Link to Course Outline

Links to Journals

Link to Assignment

Link to Assignment Development Questions

Link to Presentation Schedule

Link to Instructor's Home Page