England Semester

Westmont England Semester is occuring in the Fall of 2008 and during the fall semester on even years thereafter. More detailed information on future programs will appear as available.

Are you the sort of person enjoys traveling, reading literature and seeing plays for a semester?

The England Semester program is directed by English department faculty and combines travel to literary and cultural centers with residential study in the British Isles. Students earn between 12 and 16 units of credit in English from Westmont while studying English literature in the land of its origin, witnessing firsthand the birthplaces of major writers and the settings of their works. In past years, students have attended theatre performances in Edinburgh, London, Stratford-upon-Avon, and Dublin, and have visited sites throughout the UK and Ireland including Oxford, Cambridge, the Lake District of the Romantic poets, and Hardy’s country in southern England. Upper- division English and Theatre credit is offered.

The opportunity to go on England Semester with faculty and students who are fellow believers and are excited by learning is surely one worth pursuing. If you are interested, please contact either the English Department or the Off-Campus Programs office for more information on the program and application procedures. back to top

Fall 2008 Details

Faculty Leaders:

Dr. Paul Delaney
Prof. Elizabeth Hess

Itinerary

Edinburgh (Aug 20-30): Scotland’s most storied city, and your best shot at haggis. Visit the Castle or the Palace of Holyrood House. Climb Arthur’s Seat, or shop on Princes Street. Go to the theatre day and night and into the next day on the Fringe, a round-the-clock arts smorgasbord. Maybe even a tiny Ninja Macbeth?
Rydal Hall, Lake District (Aug 31-Sept 4): Visit the home of Wordsworth, imagine yourself as a Romantic poet, and take a boat out on Windermere. You’ve never seen so much green.
York (Sept 5-7): One of the oldest and noblest cities in all of the UK. Complete with Roman walls, the glorious York Minster, Betty’s Tearooms, and the Jorvik Viking Centre (think Iron Age cultural history meets Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion ride, and you’ll have the idea). York? Yes! Jorvik?…maybe.
London (Sept 8-13): We’ll jostle with the groundlings at Shakespeare’s Globe, ride the Tube, visit the Tower, worship at Westminster Abbey, hop a double-decker bus, look over our shoulder at Big Ben, and cross Waterloo Bridge to see what’s on offer at the National Theatre.
Woodbrooke, Birmingham (Sept 14-25): Our first home base. A Quaker retreat center where we will settle in for classes, community living, and some richly intensive exploration of literature, with a couple of evening performances in Stratford.
Galway, Ireland (Sept 26-28): A gorgeous city on the western Irish coast, renowned for its traditional Irish music played in most every pub, most every night. Take a ferry to the Aran Islands, visit Kenny’s bookshop, and enjoy the craic!
Corrymeela, Northern Ireland (Sept 29-Oct 1): A Christian retreat center dedicated to reconciliation and cross-cultural exchange. Set right on the northern coast, enjoy the views of the rocky coastline and wade in the water if you dare!
Dublin, Ireland (Oct 2-6): The centre of contemporary Irish culture. We’ll be there for the Dublin Theatre Festival. Perhaps you’ll want to visit Trinity College to see the medieval Book of Kells, or explore Dublin Castle. Or, if you still haven’t found what you’re looking for, pay a pilgrimage to the U2 Wall.
London (Oct 7-11): Time to try Indian food or Tibetan or Moroccan. The delights of the West End and the National Theatre beckon-along with shopping in Oxford Street, a day trip to Hampton Court Palace, or afternoons at the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, or the Tate Modern…Free!
Woodbrooke (Oct 12-23): More reading, more writing, more focus on academic pursuits and building community, with evening performances at Birmingham Rep.
St. Gabriel’s, Suffolk (Oct 24-30): Our second home base. An Anglican convent community in Suffolk, in reach of Norwich, Constable country, or medieval Bury St. Edmunds.
Free Weekend! (Oct 31-Nov 3): Fill in the blank…where will you find yourself? Paris? Barcelona? Florence? The sky’s the limit (as serviced by Britrail and Ryanair).
London (Nov 4-6): A ride on the Eye, a trip to find the real Lee Ho Fook, more productions at the National Theatre, and finally getting to the Tate Britain.
Stratford upon Avon (Nov 7-13): Shakespeare’s old stomping grounds. Visit Mary Arden’s house, see the Royal Shakespeare Company on stage, watch the RSC Head of Wigs and Make-up turn your best friend into a villain, do a brass rubbing.
London (Nov 14-16)
St. Gabriel’s (Nov 17-Dec 4): Time to settle in and finish papers, take final exams, and celebrate Thanksgiving on British soil.
London (Dec 5-7): Depart for LAX. Home again, home again.

Course Offerings

Shakespeare in Production: (4 units) taught by Prof. Elizabeth Hess Fulfills the English major requirement for a course in a major author; counts as dramatic literature credit for the Theatre major.

Starts from the premise that the plays of Shakespeare are works written for the stage, and are not fully realized except in the context of live performance. Students will read approximately eight Shakespeare plays, with particular focus being paid to those plays that we can see in production. While most venues have yet to announce their seasons, we already know that in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace, we will see the Royal Shakespeare Company’s productions of Hamlet (starring David Tennant and Patrick Stewart), A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, Love’s Labours Lost, and The Merchant of Venice. Students will research a past production of a Shakespeare play, and then will enjoy the thrill of imagining a future production in rehearsing and staging Shakespeare scenes of their own. Throughout, we will revel in the genius of the playwright who, for the first time in the English language, crafted characters with the complexity, contradictions, and idiosyncratic completeness to be fully human. Students who have taken ENG 117 already on campus may also take Shakespeare on England Semester for credit.

British and Irish Theatre: (4 units) Taught by Prof. Paul Delaney Fulfills the English major requirement for a course in British literature after 1800; counts as dramatic literature cred for the Theatre major.

In London, Stratford, and Dublin we will be treated to some of the best theatre in the English-speaking world, and in Edinburgh we will have access to some of the most exciting experimental theatre from around the globe. Therefore, the content of this course will be largely determined by which plays are in production during the time we are in these four cities. We will read, see, and talk together about these plays as both dramatic literature and as performance. We will address such topics as the dramaturgical elements of dramatic texts, performance styles, use of stage space, the evocative power of design choices, audience-actor relationships, and the dominant themes conveyed through text and performance.

Verse and Verity: (4 units) Taught by Prof. Elizabeth Hess Fulfills the English major requirement for a course in British literature after 1800.

From John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins to Bono, poets have written movingly of the agony and the ecstasy in the encounter between God and humanity. This course undertakes a transhistorical examination of several British poets whose writings follow the model of Jacob in wrestling with the divine. Authors studied may include Donne, Blake, Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Denise Levertov, and U.A. Fanthorpe. The work of these poets grapples with faith, confronts doubt, and seeks answers to the question of what it means to know and be known by God; this course engages in the same pursuit, with an eye to how our own faith may be deepened by the experience.

British Novel: (Un)Earthing Narrative (2 units) Taught by Prof. Elizabeth Hess

Settling in with a cup of tea and a good novel may rank right at the top of the list for satisfying ways to spend a rainy afternoon. Happily, England is well stocked in all three-tea, novels, and postmeridian damp. Even more happily, on England Semester, we have the privilege of going beyond the familiar elements of narrative--plot, character, theme, and language--to consider another--place. We will consider texts in which place plays an integral role in the narrative and explore the ways that landscape and the locale inscribe themselves in literature. We will pause in our journey around England in locations that have inspired the novelists we read, and ask how these places continue to engage in conversation with story. And who know what truths we may universally acknowledge along the way? Novels studied will include the following:

Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice
Anne Bronte The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Dorothy Sayers Gaudy Night
James Joyce Dubliners

Crossing Borders: The Poetry and Drama of Ireland, North and South (4 units) Taught by Prof. Paul Delaney

The little island just to the west of England has been responsible for some of the best literature in English of the past century. We will consider the post-colonial crafting of a national identity by poets from Yeats to Heaney--and the reexamination of that identity by more recent women poets from Eavan Boland to Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Throughout we will be questioning how the border between things British and things Irish runs through literature, as well as the border between North and South, republican and loyalist, Catholic and Protestant. In Northern Ireland we will be visiting the Corrymeela Community, commited to reconciliation in Ireland and throughout the world. In order to appreciate the difficulty of the answers, it helps to understand the context and the complexity of the questions. We will be considering questions posed by some of the following:

J.M. Synge The Playboy of the Western World
Brian Friel Translations
Marie Jones A Night in November
Sebastian Berry The Steward of Christendom
Brian Friel Dancing at Lughnasa
Christina Reid The Belle of the Belfast City

Mysteries and Martyrs, Saints and Sites (4 units) Taught by Prof. Paul Delaney Fulfills the English major requirement for a course in British literature after 1800.

Perhaps it’s easier to understand why medieval writers would write saints’ plays than to understand why modern and contemporary playwrights would revive and extend the genre. But both believers and non-believers find compelling mysteries in sainthood-and even seek to come up with some kind of secular equivalent. We will study the plays and visit some of the places-the Tower of London, Canterbury Cathedral, Dublin Castle-that they evoke. Reading chosen from:

T.S. Eliot Murder in the Cathedral
George Bernard Shaw Saint Joan
Tom Stoppard Jumpers
Tom Stoppard Professional Foul
Robert Bolt A Man for All Seasons
Dorothy Sayers The Zeal of Thy House
W.H. Auden For the Time Being
Seamus Heaney The Burial at Thebes

Intercultural Dialogues (2 units) Taught by Prof. Elizabeth Hess Fulfills the General Education requirement for Communicating Cross-Culturally

Opens a three-way conversation between three Anglophone nations--England, Ireland, and America--and in so doing attempts to come to grips with the question of what it means (in the words of Oscar Wilde) to be divided by a common language. Students will further their understanding of British and Irish culture, politics, and social structure through independent reading, research, and investigation, anchored by a weekly discussion of experiences, insights, and discoveries. Foundational to the course is the individual student’s own encounters with persons, places, and perspectives that may surprise, delight, and discomfit, encounters that ultimately enrich the experience of traveling abroad.