Mar 29, 2024  
2017-2018 HillBook (Class of 2021) 
    
2017-2018 HillBook (Class of 2021) [ARCHIVED HILL BOOK]

ENG 100/124 - On the Road: Encounters with the “Other” (Core/First-Year Seminar)

Three or Four Credits
Not Offered 2017-2018

In this course we will ask how authors from Homer to Kerouac write about journeying and encounters with “other” people, places, ideas, values, and modes of conduct. The texts we read come from disparate historical periods and from a variety of cultural contexts. As we investigate their formal and stylistic elements and their possible meanings, we will become acquainted with different literary modes, from poetry, to drama, to prose. Although the overarching theme of the course is the journey and the encounter with “otherness,” the individual texts we read present very different engagements with the subject. The journeys about which we read may be mythic, factual, intellectual, spiritual, and/or artistic; they may constitute a rite of passage or initiation; they may be brief or interminable, alienating or rewarding; they may end tragically or lead to new understanding. The course emphasizes close reading and open questioning of cultural meaning. And these are some of the works you will encounter this semester: Homer’s Odyssey; selections from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; Shakespeare’s Tempest; Goethe’s Faust; and Kerouac’s On the Road.

Prerequisite(s)/Restriction(s): ENG 124 is a First-Year Seminar and open to First-Year Students only.
General Education Attribute(s): ENG 100, for 3-credits, fulfills the Literature Cornerstone.
ENG 124, for 4-credits, fulfills the First-Year Seminar and Literature Cornerstone.
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