Alumni, Faculty, Student News

A Learning Experience in London!

You can find information about the MLP here: http://programs.capa.org/MLP.
The full list of fall 2013 course offerings is here: http://programs.capa.org/MLP/page/Academics_%28Fall_2013%29
Deadline for the fall semester is June 14. Contact your Study Abroad office for more information about applying.

CAPA, the sponsoring organization, offers need-based, merit-based, and diversity scholarships (deadline, May 15): http://programs.capa.org/MLP/page/Copy%20Of%20CAPA_Scholarships_. Your campus may have scholarships available for study abroad programs; for example, if you have a chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, there are scholarships available to members of up to $3000 (deadline, April 1).

Sara Bularzik is our contact at CAPA, and can answer any practical questions (sbularzik@capa.org).

Dr. Frangos would be happy to answer questions or provide more information about the courses she is planning (frangosj@umkc.edu).

About the UMKC Instructor:
Jennifer Frangos has degrees in English and Women’s and Gender Studies from Vassar College, the University at Buffalo, and Stony Brook University, as well as “real world” work experience with several publishing companies. At UMKC, she teaches courses including “Postmodernism and the Eighteenth Century,” “Gender Outlaws,” “The Transatlantic Eighteenth Century,” “Jane Austen: Novels and Film,” and a hands-on class on copyediting and production. She is editor of the academic journal The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation; author of essays on Anne Lister, Aphra Behn, eighteenth-century ghost stories, and Transatlantic pedagogy; and faculty advisor to the Nu Theta chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the international English honor society.

Instructor Course Descriptions:

Shakespeare
This course will introduce students to the study of Shakespeare, with an emphasis on connecting the texts to the historical and cultural contexts in which Shakespeare wrote them and his original audiences watched them. Rather than trying to read as many plays as possible, we will focus on four that span his writing career — Titus Andronicus (ca. 1593), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (ca. 1595), Hamlet (ca. 1599–1600), and The Tempest (ca. 1611) — and will read deeply rather than quickly, taking time to track down allusions, consider vocabulary and linguistic change, identify sources, clarify cultural beliefs and practices, and explore the performance and printing history. We’ll consider Shakespeare’s position in the English canon and his role in the study of English Literature by reading these plays through the lenses of various schools of literary criticism and academic discussion using the materials collected in the Bedford editions of these texts: A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Texts and Contexts, Hamlet: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism, and The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy. As well, we will incorporate film adaptations (including Julie Taymor’s versions of Titus and The Tempest) and variations of the Hamlet role (by Kenneth Branagh, Ethan Hawke, Mel Gibson, and Laurence Olivier) into our discussion.
In addition to typical face-to-face time in the classroom, we will make extensive use of the museums, libraries, galleries, and sites in London to contextualize our readings, including Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, the British Library, the British Museum, the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, the Tate Galleries, the National Portrait Gallery, the Museum of London, and the Geffrye Museum.
Required coursework will include performances of scenes, research activities on historical/geographical/cultural/literary elements or allusions in the plays, a formal research presentation, two major essays with at least one serious revision each, and a take-home final exam. In addition, each student will be required to attend live performances of a play by Shakespeare (or one of his contemporaries) and write a review of the production that situates the performance with respect to our ongoing class discussion. (I will provide a list of approved performances, but please feel free to research on your own and propose alternatives.)

The Novel Before 1900: London In Literature — Plagues, Thieves, Ingénues, and Monsters
“The Novel Before 1900” offers an intensive concentration on novels written before 1900; this semester, we will read a range of novellas and novels written between the early 1600s and the turn of the 20th century and set in London: possible readings include Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, and/or Moll Flanders, Frances Burney’s Evelina, Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Where film adaptations of these texts are available, we’ll watch and discuss those as well. In addition to mapping/walking the various characters’ excursions through the London streets, we will visit many of the sites mentioned in the texts (the site of Newgate Prison, where Moll Flanders was born; the Theatre Royal in Haymarket, where Evelina sees a performance by David Garrick; “Holmes’s house” at 221B Baker Street; the East End, where Jekyll [and Jack the Ripper] prowled), and will study the growth of London from the Roman City proper to the metropolitan center of the British Empire, including visits to the Museum of London, the British Library’s maps collection, and the Geffrye Museum.
Required coursework will include two major essays with at least one serious revision each, periodic reading quizzes, a formal research presentation on a historical or cultural element in at least one of the novels, and a take-home final exam. As well, students will be required to attend and review at least 5 cultural events offered in London, ranging from a play to a Jack-the-Ripper tour of the East End to a classical concert at St. Martin’s in the Fields or a relevant special exhibit or activity at a London museum such as the V&A or the Foundling Museum. (I will provide a list of approved cultural events, but please feel free to research on your own and propose alternatives.)

ALUMNI NEWS

THE GREEN PATH, Steven Clark's first novel, was published by Black Oak Media in the summer of 2013.
Steven graduated with a B.A. in English in 1980 from UMSL, and
in autumn of 2013 his short story THE MAGGOT WRANGLER was published by Mozark Press.
In the St. Louis Cinemaspoke contest of that year, his screenplay EDGAR HUNTLY, an adaptation of the
novel (1792) by Charles Brockden Brown, was runner-up in the contest.

Douglas Harrison (BA 98) has been named Associate Professor of English, and Assistant Director of the Center for Faculty Innovation, at James Madison University. His second book, The Gospel Sensibility: Faith, Fallibility, and Feeling and American Sacred Song, has been awarded a Kluge Research Fellowship by the Library of Congress.