Special Topics course for

Autumn Quarter 2009

Here is a great new “special topics” course being offered this coming fall that will also count as satisfying the Twentieth-Century Literature requirement for the major. (It’s also a “W” course.) This upper-division course would be great for juniors and seniors – as well as advanced sophomore students – who are interested in studying fictional retellings of Christ’s life in many different contexts, faithful and otherwise.

Since we don’t do these kinds of interesting and unusual classes that often, I don’t want you all to miss an exciting opportunity.

ENG 4950,  Special Topics: The Life of Jesus in Modern Fiction

Prof. Mark Walhout

CRN 7596

MWF  11:00- 12:20

Course description:

From Steinbeck’s Jim Casy to Faulkner’s Joe Christmas, modern fiction is full of famous Christ-figures.  Less well known are modern historical novels based on the life of Jesus—the “Fifth Gospels,” as Theodore Ziolkowski called them in his classic study Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus.  The best-known of these “fifth gospels,” perhaps, is Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ (1955), the basis of the controversial 1988 film by Martin Scorsese. 

Needless to say, the authors of these modern “fifth gospels” have tended to be pagans, Communists, and assorted heretics—anything but orthodox Christians.  Their Jesus tends to be a very human Jesus—all too human, many say.  And yet they saw something in the figure of Jesus that transcends the religion founded in His name—a religion most of them, alas, could not follow.

But wait: popular Christian writers, too, have undertaken life-of-Jesus novels based on the New Testament.  Lutheran pastor Walter Wangerin, for example, has recently written a trilogy of biblical novels, starting with The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel.  And New Orleans writer Anne Rice, formerly the best-selling author of the LeStat series of vampire novels, has launched an ambitious new “Christ the Lord” series of first-person novels narrated by Jesus Himself.

Tentative Reading List:

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ

Norman Mailer, The Gospel According to the Son

Anne Rice, Road to Cana

Jose Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ

Walter Wangerin, Jesus: A Novel

Special Topics course for Spring Quarter 2010

Coming soon!

ENG 4950, Special Topics:  "Promised Lands"

Prof. Doug Thorpe

Course description:

In this course we will be exploring the meaning of the phrase "promised lands" as it has been applied to both the Holy Land of Israel/Palestine and to our own country. Where does the term originate? How has it been applied? What are its implications? What are its dangers? And what does the phrase suggestion about the actual land itself and how we use it -- or abuse it?

We will attempt some to these and other questions through the lens of scripture, literature, and other art forms -- incorporating environmental, historical, and geographical perspectives, as well.