Viewing: ENGL 109 A: Literature and Business

Last approved: Tue, 09 Oct 2018 19:46:47 GMT

Last edit: Tue, 09 Oct 2018 19:44:06 GMT

Rationale for Inactivation

Last Effective Term

Requested By

First Name	Last Name	Userid	Title	Home School	Org Short Name
Jed	Esty	esty	Vartan Gregorian Professor	School of Arts and Sciences	English Department

Course Subject

ENGLISH

Course Number

109

Start Term

Spring 2019

Committee Term

Fall 2018

Course Title

Literature and Business

Course Description

An introduction not only to representations of business in literary texts, but also to the business of literature itself. The course explores the representation of modern commerce and entrepreneurial life, financial and legal structures in industrial and advanced capitalism, doctrines of prosperity and economic growth, and the emotional, moral, and social life of women and men working in business. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description from our current offerings (taught Spring 2017).

Also Offered As

Syllabus

Lit Bus Syllabus copy-1.pdf

Course Frequency

Every Other Term

Sector Requirements

Your department or program fields a variety of courses to meet distinct educational needs. Please explain how this course fits into your department's plan for participating in the general education curriculum of the College. The sector panel will want to know what is distinctive about this course along with the other courses your department lists in the sector that makes them suitable for the sector requirement.

Endorser Justification

This course complements ENGL106 "Literature and Law" and ENGL107 "Literature and Medicine" -- both sector-fulfilling courses that demonstrate the application of critical and close reading models of analysis onto a broadened range of materials. The design of this course was a joint effort between the instructor and the Undergraduate Executive Committee in English, and the flexible final project in particular is an effort to open this course to the more general capacities for interpretation that distinguish general requirement courses in the College.

Term Offered

One-term course offered either term

Sector Requirements

Arts & Letters Sector

Format

SEM

Instructor Name

Jed Esty

Instructor Type

Standing Faculty

Instructor Status

Standing Faculty

Place in Curriculum

We have developed this course as part of a suite of classes designed to combine the university-level study of literature with a direct attention to the historical representation of the professions, thus Lit and Law, Lit and Medicine, Lit and Business.
These courses not only address social and thematic content related to professional practice and life, but also compare the kinds of intellectual and evidentiary norms that define knowledge in the humanities and in the practical arts and sciences.
This is an introductory course; we anticipate Wharton undergraduate will take it to fulfill their Flexible Gen Ed requirements. College students may take it to fulfill Sector 3 (if our application is successful). Humanities majors may take the class as a stepping stone to majors in English or History.

Instructor's Objectives

1) Introduce a mix of College and Wharton undergraduates to the varied and changing representations of modern commerce, corporate and entrepreneurial life, financial and legal structures in industrial and advanced capitalism, doctrines of prosperity and economic growth, and the emotional, moral, and social life of women and men working in business from 1850 to the present.
2) Foster an intellectual and analytical understanding of the cultural divide at Penn between applied/professional/pragmatic education and the liberal arts curriculum.
3) Teach close, logical, and systematic analysis of texts looking for sociohistorical meaning and symbolic/allegorical complexity.
4) Improve written and oral skills of evidence-based argumentation and composition.

Methods of Assessment

Number and size of paper(s) assigned

5 x 400 words
1 x 1500 words
1 x 2000 words
5500 words of writing total = approx 20 pages

Number and type of exams

none

Other Requirements

group participation and reading journals

Sector I - Society

How does this course allow students to formulate and test social science hypotheses?

How does the course provide students with an understanding of social theories?

How will students understand the basis of empirical social science?

How will students gather and interpret data about social phenomena?

How does the course encourage students’ understanding of culture, religion, class, gender, race, or other fundamental social constructs?

How does the course enable students to understand the role of institutions in society, the relationship between individuals and those institutions, or the relationship among ideologies, values, and individual behavior?

Sector II - History and Tradition

How does this course allow students to read and interpret primary sources?

How will students be able to contextualize the primary materials they examine?

How will students closely read materials and discuss their core ideas?

How will students learn to interpret visual or material objects?

How do students have the opportunity to write significant interpretive essays about the sources they study?

How does the course provide students with an interpretive framework for analyzing change over time?

How does the course contribute to understanding of how knowledge is constructed and how interpretive frameworks change over time?

Sector III - Arts & Letters

How does the course allow students to develop interpretive strategies for analyzing visual, aural or literary texts?

The course trains students to do close analysis of literary and cinematic objects through guided small group discussion and debate; through organized expository essays; and through research-intensive reports.

How does the course offer students ample opportunity to write significant interpretive essays?

As noted above, the course asks students to write frequent short analytical papers that are informal as well as two significant formal essays, one on close analysis and one with a research component.

How does the course allow students to develop an appreciation of the creative process within a medium or in a variety of artistic media?

The course also asks students to complete a final project that includes an optional multimedia component; quoting from the syllabus, students are asked to do a "longer research project that culminates in a paper, poster, slideshow, webpage, presentation, or video"

If a course is narrowly focused, how does it provide for breadth through understanding the social context or continuing significance of the work(s) being analyzed?

The course covers "the representation of modern commerce, corporate and entrepreneurial life, financial and legal structures in industrial and advanced capitalism, doctrines of prosperity and economic growth, and the emotional, moral, and social life of women and men working in business from the early-mid-1800s to the present. " This historical sweep, moving across film, poetry, and fiction (though largely focused on fiction) allows for a broad understanding of the works. Additional research provides an opportunity to situate works in both social and historical context.

Sector IV - Humanities and Social Science

How does the course integrate theory with practical applications?

How are students allowed the opportunity to reflect on practice?

How does the course allow students to integrate approaches from two or more humanities or social science disciplines?

How does the course place creative practice in writing, music or the fine arts in an interpretive context?

Sector V - Living World

How does the course allow students to examine data, critically assess their origins, and consider the conclusions that can be drawn from them?

How does the course teach students how experimental and observational methods, as well as quantitative reasoning, are applied to the study of living systems?

How do students learn the methods used by contemporary natural science to study how organisms influence and are influenced by the environment?

How do students learn how to characterize and analyze basic population dynamics?

How do students learn about ecological diversity and how to measure it?

Sector VI - Physical World

Does the course allow students to examine data, critically assess their origins, and consider the conclusions that can be drawn from them?

How does the course teach students how experimental and observational methods, as well as quantitative reasoning, are applied to the study of physical systems?

How do students learn the methods used by contemporary natural science to study interactions among physical systems?

How does the course have students use mathematical methods to test observational data and formulate and test hypotheses?

How do students learn about the relevance of theory to the world of ordinary observation?

Sector VII - Natural Sciences and Mathematics

How does this course integrate knowledge across two or more disciplines in the natural sciences/mathematics?

How does the course integrate theory with practice?

Administrative Field

College reason for proposal

Committee

College Curriculum Committee

Committee reader

Committee Reader
jbehrman
akano

Administrative Status

Reviewer Comments

Molly Mcglone (mmcglone) (Tue, 09 Oct 2018 19:44:06 GMT): The HSS panel had questions about the suite of courses "Literature and "Law", "Lit and Business" and "Lit and Medicine"- especially the role of "and" as well as the various sector designations. The department answered with: he “and” does indeed function differently across the three different courses in the suite we envision, and this difference is also connected to the larger question about the difference between the courses pegged for Sector III and Sector IV. “Literature and Law” belongs to a defined and now longstanding interdisciplinary field (with, for example, its own journal Law and Literature) that applies legal theory and history within literary sources and also uses literary modes of interpretation for reconsidering legal texts. There is considerable discourse within the field about the conjunction and potential prepositions that could take its place — as in, “law in literature,” “law as literature,” and so forth. Our “Literature and Law” offerings are taught by faculty that belong to this subfield. By contrast, “Literature and Medicine” and “Literature and Business” do not belong to established subfields. In both cases strong arguments could be made for interdisciplinarity, but as these courses presently stand we see them as introducing and interrogating modes of literary critical analysis via representations of these professions (though I should emphasize that “Literature and Medicine” is quite an innovative course that prominently features extraliterary texts). I’m glad to hear that the committee liked the content and rigor of “Literature and Business”; we hoped that the literary sweep of the primary texts as well as the canonical secondary sources in economics and social science would invite undergraduates from SAS and Wharton to think more broadly and perhaps even more critically about the figuration of businessmen and women. " Engl 109 is approved for Arts & Letters.