Senior Experience
All English majors must complete a Senior Experience, for which they have three options: participation in the Senior Seminar in English (English 499) or a Humanities Senior Seminar (Humanities 497), or completion of an Independent Study project (English 490). The Senior Seminar in English, which requires departmental approval, is a venue for students to research and write a thesis. Humanities Senior Seminars generally focus on a single major work or author. Students read contextualizing texts and secondary criticism, meet with visiting scholars, and compose and present a substantial paper. Independent Study, which requires departmental approval, is primarily for creative projects.
Senior Seminar in English and Independent Study
This spring, eight English students are completing theses in the English Seminar. Krystle Hara is writing about male-male friendship in Shakespeare�s plays. Erin West is examining the politics and aesthetics of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, focusing on John Everett Millais�s Ophelia and the poems of Christina Rossetti. Laura Crisp is studying Charles Baxter�s novel The Feast of Love. Lauren Quinlan is writing about gender and power in the forgotten short stories and newspaper serials of Louise May Alcott. Michael Inouye is considering three texts�the films Network and Magnolia, and Don DeLillo�s novel White Noise�that anticipate the question of hyperreality in a YouTube culture. Elvia Mandujano is writing about the figures of La Malinche/Malintzin and La Virgen de Guadalupe, as well as several Chicana novels, from a Chicana feminist perspective. Beth Doughty is studying the Old Testament Song of Solomon. Lindsay Dygert is examining the Southern Gothic literary movement.
Two students are completing creative Independent Study Projects. Noelle Scalpone is writing a story from the point of view of a narrator with a mental illness. Erin Kulmac is putting together a chapbook.
Spring 2007 Humanities Seminars
This spring, Michael Strelow is teaching a Humanities Seminar on William Faulkner�s The Sound in the Fury, and Gerard Bowers is teaching a Humanities Seminar on the poetry of Jorie Graham.
Past Humanities Seminars
Nightwood (Michel)
Published in 1937, Djuna Barnes's novel Nightwood was immediately recognized as a great work of art, a masterpiece comparable, T.S. Eliot argued in his enthusiastic introduction, to the finest Elizabethan tragedy. In complex, dense, and stunningly beautiful prose, Barnes delineates the lives of her characters and offers a meditation on love, loss, language, and identity. Set mostly in Paris between the world wars, the novel has been seen as both a prescient critique of fascism and a trenchant deconstruction of the illusions of historical progress and historiography.
Invisible Man (Lewis and Michel)
Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) is one of the great American novels of the twentieth century. This complex, comic, and surreal picaresque traces the journey of its unnamed narrator from south to north, from innocence to experience, and from paradox to paradox. Drawing on folklore and preaching, blues and jazz, the novel explores the tropes and traps of American history and literature, of mechanistic modernity, of sight, insight, and subjectivity.
King Lear (Moon)
Lear is considered by many (including me) to be Shakespeare�s greatest tragedy: it confronts identity and self-knowledge, love and forgiveness, madness and folly, aging and wisdom, power and complete powerlessness. It presents intriguing textual problems (quarto vs. folio) and a fascinating performance history, including rewrites to provide a happy ending. There have been about a dozen film versions made in English�notably Peter Brook�s with Paul Scofield (1971), Michael Elliott�s with Laurence Olivier (1984) and two TV productions directed by Jonathan Miller (1975, 1982)�and the re-imaginings of the play include Kurosawa�s Ran (1985), A Thousand Acres (1997), King of Texas (2001), and The Broken Lance (1954). Thus, the text offers students many avenues of approach, from philosophical and thematic issues, to questions of the text and of intertextuality, to film and theater.
Other recent Humanities Seminars have examined the poetry of Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot; Ralph Waldo Emerson�s Essays; Herman Melville�s Moby Dick; Henry David Thoreau�s Walden; James Joyce�s Ulysses; Charlotte Bront�s Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens�s Great Expectations; Alfred Hitchcock�s films Vertigo and Psycho; and Nathaniel Hawthorne�s The Scarlet Letter.