Autumn Quarter in Rome 2019

Credits

15 UW Quarter Credits

Courses

ENGL 363: Literature and The Other Arts and Disciplines: Connecting Literary Texts to Physical Spaces and Artifacts in Rome (5 credits) VLPA

In this literature course, we'll examine the relationships between the work of 19th-century American writers and the arts they reference in Rome: works of painting, sculpture, and architecture which figure prominently in their novels, travel memoirs, diaries, essays, and poems. Beginning with Hawthorne's The Marble Faun, we'll address how Rome emerges across its architecture, art, and ruins as a lamination of multiple histories--a trans-temporal landscape--and in the process we'll explore how immersion in the "eternal city" de-parochializes a point of view too naively situated within its own moment in history. As we pursue our literary study through writings by Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglas, Mark Twain, and Henry James, we'll discover how Rome invites hospitality to an open-ended rather than a closed, doctrinaire sense of cultural power.

Learning goals include:
To read 19th Century American literature that references Rome and see how those references layer onto the city itself; To draw connections between texts and physical works of art, architecture, and sculpture To explore the relationship between sense of place, the mutability of culture, and how this is registered in literary texts Course satisfies VLPA requirement and the pre-1900 literary history requirement for English majors.

ENGL 381: Advanced Expository Writing: Exploring Rome Through Writing (5 credits) This is a C or W credit writing course (Composition or Writing Across Curriculum)

Reading, writing and traveling are all acts of the imagination. This course will allow us to "see" the places we're visiting in real time and prepare for the places we plan on visiting. Our workshop will offer the scholar/traveler a way to synthesize her experiences, transforming them into essays, articles, poems or vignettes. Our time together will help to set a practice for writing, and exploring, within a community of other writers so we can have methods to document our experiences by keeping notebook/records of the sights, sounds, smells and impressions of the places we've visited in English 395 and transform these into more formal pieces of writing. By reading poems, stories, essays and articles that illuminate the art of travel and offer contemporary readings of Italy, we'll test out a range of styles and stances. These activities will reveal our initial assumptions about what it means to travel and to write about what we experience by traveling, using writing as a method of inquiry and imagination as well as documentation.
This course meets the Forms and Genres requirement (or English electives) in the English Language and Literature major (for this program only). It may also count toward the composition or additional writing requirement.
Learning goals include:
1) To learn on-the-ground, hands-on strategies of journalistic, creative, and scholarly travel writing; 2) To reflect upon texts by established, literary writers and identify writing strategies to practice; 4) To read, analyze, and synthesize complex texts and incorporate multiple kinds of observation and evidence to generate and support writing; 5) To develop good critical feedback practices with colleagues in order to create a dynamic learning community.  

ENGL 395: Study Abroad: Connecting Fables and Spaces in Dialogue, Visits and in Writing (5 credits) VLPA

This course includes an introduction to Italian language and culture, along with excursions to Florence and to local museums and sites. We will also connect literary texts and writing practices to our site visits and use these to produce final projects. Our work will entail: 1) doing intensive research prior to actual on-site visitations; 2) reading selected studies which theorize about the nature of travel and travel writing along with texts which model forth what alert travel--and alert travel writing--entails; 3) participating actively in the tours, recording one's observations, and asking questions of on-site guides; 4) and, finally, debriefing sessions, so to speak, involving oral presentations presented to the group at large, and precipitating group discussion. The work in the course is coordinated with writing practices in ENGL 381, and with readings and seminar discussions required in ENGL 363.

Learning goals include:
1. To glean basic Italian phrases from a short immersion; 2. To connect literary analysis to observations about place and articulating these in prose; 3. To practice collaboration and learning in a non-American setting