ENGL 2011 Sections: Spring 2018

ENGL 2011 (Honors I: Literary Study through Reading and Research) is a four-credit Honors introduction to writing across the curriculum, and it fulfills the freshman English requirement for Honors students.

First-year Honors students who have not satisfied the freshman English requirement through AP, ECE, or transfer credit for ENGL 1010/1011 must take ENGL 2011 (instead of 1010 or 1011) in order to earn Sophomore Honors. This course is also strongly recommended for all first-year Honors students. Study of literature—and the development of important critical reading, writing, and information literacy skills—in the university setting is essential preparation for further study in a wide variety of fields.

There are two themed “pods” of ENGL 2011 for this semester, each of which consists of multiple sections supervised by an English faculty member.

Modern Immigrant Narratives

America is known as a country of immigrants, a “melting pot,” the land of opportunities and a welcoming place for those in need. This, at least, is the story we have learned from the traditional immigrant narratives, found easily in popular literature and film. In this class, however, we will study modern immigrant narratives that challenge the traditional model and tell a more complex story. These new narratives, consisting of books, films, and even TV shows produced in the recent years, will help us consider the most pressing (and persistent) issues that shape the modern experience of immigration, such as the myth of the American dream, the question of acculturation vs. assimilation, the impact of racial and religious prejudice, changes in familial relations, globalization, and of course, the debate over immigration reform.

Documentary Film and the Question of Truth

Patricia Aufderheide remarks eloquently that “documentaries are about real life; they are not real life.” Following logically, we might ask whether documentaries have more to do with truth, per se, or the ways we construct and consume stories about the truth. Furthermore, to what degree has the indecipherability of differences between fiction and non-fiction stories in our current media landscape—our inability to know how close we actually are to the truth—exacerbated ideological divisions that cause us to interpret the same realities in dramatically different ways?

In this class, we will use the art form of documentary film to explore these and other questions about the representation of truth and reality in art, media, and narrative form more generally—all with a focus on how conceptual issues of representation impact the ways we write. Studying a mix of about ten classic and recent documentaries, often in comparison with non-filmic meditations on truth, we’ll celebrate the complexities of these beautiful films and delve deeply into the philosophical and aesthetic questions they inspire.

Films will likely include some of the following: Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov; 1929); Cameraperson (Kirsten Johnson; 2016); The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer; 2012); Touching the Void (Kevin Macdonald; 2003); Tower (Keith Maitland; 2016); Gimme Shelter (Albert and David Maysles; 1970); Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel; 2012); Frontline: League of Denial: The NFL’s Concussion Crisis (Michael Kirk; 2013); Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami; 1990); and Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley; 2012). Other texts will include The Return of Martin Guerre (historiography; Natalie Zemon Davis; 1983); Serial, Season 1 (podcast; Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder; 2014); and Rashomon (feature film; Kurosawa; 1950), as well as key philosophical writings on truth and reality.