Fall 2022 Westmont's England Semester

Satisfies the historically organized and English prior to 1800 requirements in the English major

From Beowulf to Virginia Woolf and beyond, to contemporary Anglophone writers, this course will draw on our locations for literary context and will help us explore how literature can equip us to become more attentive and informed visitors in the British Isles, as well as how places makes us more attentive readers. In the first week of the semester, there will be an exam on authors, chronology, and location to prepare students to function as their own literary guides, with expectations for what to look for in any British locale. Each student will also select one literary figure to present to the class on location. As we read through British literature, short essays will give students the opportunity to reflect on connections and disjunctions between sites, theater, scenes, and texts.

Satisfies the Single Author requirement for the English major. 

Bernadine Evaristo, the recent Booker Prize winner, has lamented how often readers seem to think that Black British literary culture is a phenomenon of middle-class London in the 21st Century. This course will take the arguably best know Black middle-class fiction writer and read her in the context of writers across class and region, as well as historical difference. Starting with Smith's essays and short fiction, and moving to novels such as White Teeth, NW, and Swing Time, we will consider Smith in relation to other novels by Black women writers, including Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other, Andrea Levy's Small Island, and the anonymous novel The Woman of Colour, as well as poetry and essays by a variety of writers. Along with brief analytical papers, students will develop individual research projects, drawing on primary sources, relevant exhibits, site visits, plays, and lectures to shape their topic, and relying on major critical sources for development and support.

Satisfies the Identity requirement and the Anglophone requirement in the major.

From St. Columba to Bono, Irish literature has drawn on local and global influences to build a rich literary tradition. We’ll begin with Ancient Irish tales and continue through the literature of British colonialism, Irish Independence and early Nationalism, then on to literature of the Troubles and today’s poetry, lyrics, and fiction. Writers will include Edgeworth, Yeats, Joyce, Lewis, Bowen, Friel, Heaney, McCann, Boland, Sands, Ni Dhomhnaill, and Meehan.

Satisfies the GE Communicating Cross-Culturally  requirement, and counts toward the English major.

This course will offer guidance and practice in how to learn and grow from first-hand experience of British sites, theater performances, guest lecturers, hosts, current events, and artifacts which have played, and are still playing, significant roles in English history and literature. Along with our collective study of contemporary Britain in its cultural diversity, this course will create an environment in which our spiritual and intellectual lives are seamlessly woven together in our daily lives as we travel through the semester. Required of all England Semester 2022 students.

This course is designed to help you stay active and healthy while you explore the landscapes, streetscapes, and local opportunities for indoor and outdoor activities in the places we visit. Often these landscapes will be the ones that writers as diverse as Geoffrey Chaucer, Charlotte Brontë, James Joyce, and Zadie Smith walked. This course will give us practice in exploring new urban and rural spaces, in minimizing our impact on resources, and in discovering how some forms of exercise can help relieve the personal stress of cross-cultural travel, and the while better acquainting us with the contexts that shaped writers on our syllabi.