ENGL 3810

Uncanny Reading, Canny Critical Writing

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2014-2015.

Reading and writing are uncanny practices: the ghosts of earlier fictions return in later ones, which "read" their precursors hauntedly. And canny critical writing repeats the process explicitly and clearly. In this course we'll read Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire; Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre with Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Henry James's Turn of the Screw; a tale by E.T.A. Hoffmann and a treatise by Sigmund Freud; Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and its postcolonial revision, Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North; and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway with Michael Cunningham's The Hours. We'll write frequently and read one another's works as collaborators and critics, producing portfolios of finished prose by the semester's end. See http://courses.cit.cornell.edu/sad4449/3810/.

When Offered Fall.

Permission Note Enrollment limited to: 15 students.

Distribution Category (LA-AS)

Comments A writing sample is required.

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