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
Last spring, eight English students completed theses in the Senior Seminar in English. Shawn Cigliano examined three Early Modern plays--Arden of Faversham, Titus Andronicus, and The Duchess of Malfi--in light of gender formation and performativity. Jon Collins studied themes of identity and the ethical or existential construction of the self in Moby Dick. Max Kirchner read the poetry of William Blake as dialectical. Jamie North studied the literary concept of the wolf in terms of political theorist Giorgio Agamben's concepts of "bare life," "sacred life," "sovereignty," and "exception." Courtney Osit analyzed Marlowe's Dr. Faustus in an instance of a "gift-giving economy" in which Faustus is, himself, the gift. Everett ottinger read Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony through the lens of hybridity theory and trauma studies. Candice Peaslee made a feminist analysis of the necessity of Anna's suicide in Anna Karenina. Andrew Smith explored how the sounds in Wallace Steven's poetry, focusing on Harmonium, interact with his ideas, and the effect that the music of the poem has on the meaning of the poem.
Professor Tobias Menely will lead the Senior Seminar in English, Spring 2010.
Fall 2009 Humanities Seminar
Jorie Graham, The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994 Prof. Gerard Bowers
One of the most important and complex poets now writing, Jorie Graham has authored eight books of poetry, each different in style from the one before. Her preoccupations are those in the tradition of intellectual poetry that derives from Emerson and Whitman, through Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens: specifically, she is interested in the themes of mind and body, self and Self, poet and reader, art and nature.
One critic has defined her three central themes as "the movement of the mind in action"; "the role of the body in experiencing the world"; and "the pressures of material conditions on mind and body alike." The Dream of the Unified Field won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, 1996.
Spring 2010 Humanities Seminars
John Milton, Paradise Lost Prof. Allison Hobgood
Milton's epic Paradise Lost (published 1667, 1674) is considered by many scholars, readers, and authors to be one of the greatest works ever composed in the English language. As Milton himself explained, the poem, based loosely on the Judeo-Christian story of the temptation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and subsequent Fall of Man, was meant to "justify the ways of God to men." We will explore Milton's impulse to clarify God's plan and thereby elucidate the tensions between God's omniscient power and humankind's free will. We will also interrogate other broad, humanistic questions: can the impulse to evil, represented in this poem by an extremely seductive Satan, be avoided? What is humanity's obligation to "goodness"? How does Milton's translation of "the Fall" describe humankind's weakness via deeply gendered language? How does that language reify or undermine both early modern and contemporary gender dynamics?
Through an intensive study of each of the 12 books of Paradise Lost, we will also investigate how literature, in this case epic poetry, not only shapes the moral and philosophical debates of its time period but is sculpted by them.
Victor Kelmperer, LTI: The Language of the Third Reich Prof. Sammy Basu (Politics)
A 20th C. landmark: The astute yet accessible reflections of a 'German-Jewish' Dresden professor of romance studies on the complex dynamics of art, culture, language, and propaganda during the late Weimar Republic and Nazi Third Reich.
Klemperer wrote LTI in 1946, culling observations from his equally remarkable (and subsequently published) diaries for 1933-1945, I Will Bear Witness (Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten: Tagebucher, 1933-1945), in an effort to bring his scholarly and philological acuity to bear on 'the Nazi question': "How was it possible for educated people to betray their entire education, culture and humanity to such an extent?" (p.250). His answer extends from the Enlightenment and Romanticism to everyday conversation, from brith announcements to punctuation, children's books to concentration camps and implicates word and image, reason and affect, arts and sciences. Inasmuch as LTI elaborates on Schiller's theme of "language which writes and thinks for you!" (p.234) by commenting on significant political, cultural, and academic material (texts, images, and films), the course will shift back and forth between close-reading of the text and our own analysis of some of this material, against the backdrop of Weimar modernism and democratization, including the films Der Letzte Mann (1924; retitled: The Last Laugh) directed by F.W. Murnau and Triumph des Willens (1935, Triumph of the Will) directed by Leni Riefenstahl; and visual art, the Drawings and Paintings (1910s-20s) of George Grosz, Photomontages (1920s-30s) of John Heartfield (1891-1968, aka Helmut Herzfeld) and The Great German Art and Degenerate Art Exhibitions of 1937, Munich, curated by Adolf Ziegler; and Mein Kampf (1925/6) and selected speeches of Adolf Hitler.
Other recent Humanities Seminars have examined Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Shakespeare's King Lear, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, the poetry of Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot; James Joyce's Ulysses; Charlotte Bront's Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens's Great Expectations; Alfred Hitchcock's films Vertigo and Psycho; Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice; and William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury.