ENG 400—Honors Seminar

The content of this course is variable. For example: J. Conte: Postmodern Culture One of the cultural turns of postmodernism is the intensifying shift from a print to a media graphics dominated culture. The prevalence of visual media has been the site of a debate regarding the relationship of complicity and/or critique of art and architecture in postmodernism. In support of the happy embrace of popular media in art and literature, the landscape designer and writer Charles Jencks, in Critical Modernism: where is post-modernism going? (2007), revises his argument that postmodern art and architecture have led the way since the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis in 1972 in adopting an eclectic style that combines popular and elite forms, mixed media, and cross-cultural references. Fredric Jameson, however, offers a more skeptical and Marxist reading of postmodernism, described as the cultural logic of late capitalism, in which the contemporary arts are seen to have been at least partially compromised by their intimate relations with consumerism and multinational corporatism. Supplementing our reading of these and other cultural critics of postmodernism, we will be examining a variety of works of postmodern art and architecture that have become test cases of what appeals to both populist and museum-going audiences. These works are either playfully ironic appropriations of popular culture; or they are coopted by the commercial and celebrity media they represent; or both. Interleaved with the art and criticism, we will read books that, in the waning days of print literature, make art and popular media the subject of sophisticated literary fictions. For example: Prof. Ming Qian Ma: Modern and Contemporary North American Poetry Designed as a survey class of modern and contemporary poetry in America, English 400 will begin with a brief review of poetry written in the traditions of Realism and Naturalism and then proceed by following a chronological approach that cover the period from the so-called High Modernism to the present, focusing on the major poetic movements such as Imagism, the Objectivist movement, the Fugitive Movement, the Confessional School, the New York School, the Harlem Renaissance, the Beat Movement, the Deep Image School, the Black Mountain School, the Language Poetry Movement, the New Formalism, and others.