ENG 450: Senior Seminar

All English majors are required to take the Eng 450: Senior Seminar course during the fall of their senior year.

Though seminars vary in focus and content, each addresses its subject in the context of current critical discourse and requires students to write a long research-based paper.

Registration for the seminars are handled through the English department administrator.  It is conducted one year in advance, during the junior year, with majors being notified of seminars offerings and registration procedures.

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Fall 2012 Senior Seminars

Eng 450-01:  Virginia Woolf in Context
Professor:  Rishona Zimring
T/TH 1:50PM-3:20PM

In this seminar, we will study several of Virginia Woolf’s major novels as well crucial examples of her non-fiction texts. We will connect her writing to the social, aesthetic, and political contexts that inform her work, such as the Great War; modernist experimentation with language, the visual arts, and performance; popular culture and English traditions; the dynamism and heterogeneity of modern urban life; education, intellectual life, and sociability; expanding opportunities for women of all classes, as well as ongoing struggles and exclusions; imperialism and its attendant cultural stances, such as exoticism and primitivism. Finally, we will consider what “contexts” or “resonances” shape not only Woolf’s writing and publication, but contemporary interpretations of her work by critics, essayists, and novelists.  Students will have the opportunity to develop research projects with varying concentrations, including formalist analyses of literary texts and arguments about cultural history.  Materials for the course will include rare and distinctive archival sources made available to us through collaboration with Watzek’s Special Collections.  Student research will culminate in a major paper and an oral presentation; students will undertake shorter, preparatory writing earlier in the semester.

 

Eng 450-02:  Shakespearean Tragedy
Professor:  Lyell Asher
T/TH 11:30AM-1:00PM

This course will focus on Shakespeare’s four main tragedies, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear, but will include considerations of Titus Andronicus, Richard III, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus.  Required secondary readings will include biographical and historical studies by Peter Holland and James Shapiro, and criticism by Samuel Johnson, A.C. Bradley, Agnes Heller, Frank Kermode, Harold Bloom and Barbara Everett, among others.  Our aim will be twofold: to consider Shakespeare against the background of classical and medieval drama, and to try to understand these plays in something like their own terms. Weekly writing assignments will lead to a final paper. Expect to do a small amount of preparatory reading over the summer.

 

Eng 450-03: William Faulkner
Professor: Kristin Fujie
T/TH 9:40AM-11:10AM

One of the most innovative and challenging writers of the twentieth century, William Faulkner has left us with a significant body of work that holds rich rewards for courageous, patient, and determined readers.  We will study just four of the nineteen novels that he wrote:  The Sound and the Fury, As I lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!.  These texts were published within a seven-year period during which Faulkner developed the radical narrative techniques that enabled him to probe the volatile nexus of gender, race, class, and sexuality which lies at the heart of his most powerful writings.  We will study the novels with an eye toward the author’s “internal career,” which means that we will trace the broader arc of his development as a writer by exploring the intricate relationships between the individual texts.  To this structure we will add a selective sampling of Faulkner criticism, in order to get a sense of how Faulkner has been read, and why his work has proven so generative for literary critics of all stamps.  This combination of close reading, intertextual reading, and research into secondary sources will prepare you for your major task of the semester, which will be to design and pursue, in close collaboration with the instructor, an independent project.  This project will culminate in a 20-plus page paper that presents an original reading of one or more novels, and also enters into dialogue with some thread of scholarly debate on Faulkner’s work.

 

Eng 450-04:  Henry James
Professor:  Rachel Cole
M/W 11:30AM-1:00PM

“Deep experience is never peaceful,” James wrote.  He could have been describing the experience of reading one of his novels.  Full of difficult people — and difficult sentences — James fiction is some of the most challenging in the English language.  In this seminar we will take a few choice examples of his work (Portrait of a Lady, What Maisie Knew, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, “The Beast in the Jungle”, “The Turn of the Screw”) and plumb them for pleasure of intellectual profit.

Along the way, each student will pursue an individual project of his or her own design.  The project will culminate in a 20-page seminar paper that positions an original treatment of one of James’s works in the context of current critical conversations.  Preparatory assignments will include a series of short response papers, a topic proposal, an abstract, and an annotated bibliography.  In the final days of the semester we will hold a workshop, with students presenting their projects to their colleagues in the class.