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 2024 Senior Seminars

ENG 450-01: Bleak House 
Professor: Will Pritchard
MWF 1:50-2:50pm

Charles Dickens was the most popular and perhaps the greatest novelist of the nineteenth century, and Bleak House (1852-53) is regarded by many as his masterpiece. It offers a panoramic view of British society from the landed aristocrat Sir Leicester Dedlock to the unhoused orphan Jo, the crossing sweeper. It is a sprawling, gripping, complex narrative, and it features some of Dickens’ most dazzling and audacious writing.

This section of ENG 450 will be devoted to a close study of this fascinating novel, and there will be four phases to our work. First, before the semester begins, students will complete a first reading of the book (it’s long: approximately 1000 pp.). Second, during the first seven weeks of the semester we will re-read the novel in the nineteen monthly installments in which it was originally published (one per class). Third, we will spend a few weeks reading some of what has been written about Bleak House in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. Finally, in the final weeks of the semester each student will produce a seminar paper that is approximately 20 pages long (ca. 6000 words) and that draws on primary and secondary sources.

 

Eng 450-02: Medieval Romance
Professor: Karen Gross
M 3-4:30pm, Th 3:30-5pm

 

Modern “romance” conjures stories of love and passion, often with some element of the silly or improbable (think rom-com). In the twelfth-century, a “romance” connoted simply a narrative in French, as opposed to Latin, yet there are medieval reasons for why this word now means something so different to modern readers.

This seminar will explore Middle English examples of “medieval romance,” a vexed category that encompasses some of the Middle Ages’s finest literature and trashiest pulp. Just as with the modern genre, the plot of the medieval romance frequently centers on love and sex. But the medieval romance is also preoccupied with matters of identity formation, both at the individual and the national level, which prove to be as unstable as the genre itself. Our primary readings will frequently foreground instances of hybridity and metamorphosis, whether that be among genders, religions, social classes, or even species, both animal and supernatural. While not on the scale of epics, romances are frequently stories of kingdom building, from King Arthur’s efforts to cement control to crusading enterprises in lands distant from England. Romances are also often self-consciously literary, using marvels to interrogate the ethics of fiction and artifice. Recently, the medieval romance has lent itself well to queer theory, eco-criticism, and disability studies.

As part of the seminar, you are asked to write a research paper (20-25 pages), along with preparatory assignments; you are also expected to give a formal presentation to the class on a portion of your research, offer detailed feedback on your peers’ work, and generally be an engaged contributor of good will to our discussions. I expect to adapt our readings, both primary and secondary, to your interests as they develop. We will definitely read together Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Sir Orfeo , and we may look at, for example, Awyntyrs of Arthure , the Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell , Sir Launfal , Sir Gowther , Amis and Amiloun , Emaré , Sir Cleges , King of Tars , The Wife of Bath’s Tale , The Squire of Low Degree (“Undo Your Door”) . Depending upon suggestions, I am open to incorporating later adaptations of the medieval romance. There will almost certainly be quests, fairies, giants, a magic cloak, a ghost or two, and possibly a flesh ball. I can’t promise that everything we encounter will be the best that medieval literature can offer, but it won’t be boring.

Feel free to write me if you have any questions!

 

Eng 450-03: Regional Modernism 
Professor: Kristin Fujie
MWF 11:30-12:30pm

In this course we will explore the overlap between two movements in American literature that are often perceived to be distinct and even adversarial to one another: regionalism and modernism. Rooted in the nineteenth-century and popularized by writers such as Sarah Orne Jewett and Mark Twain, regionalist fiction typically focuses on rural settings and local cultures, and has been characterized by its critics as provincial, quaint, and nostalgic. Literary modernism, in contrast, erupts in the twentieth-century and on an international scale. Typically associated with urban centers and characterized by formal experimentation and complexity, it is anything but quaint. And yet, a distinct strain of regionalism persists within the modernism of writers such as William Faulkner, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Jean Toomer, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor, and Leslie Marmon Silko, all of whom wrote with a strong sense of sense of place. We will read just a selection of these writers, as well as a sampling of literary criticism about them. Your primary creative task for the semester will be to write a 20-page essay that presents an original reading of one or more of the texts from the course, and also enters into dialogue with some thread of scholarly debate. Reading list will be finalized over the summer based in part on student interest, so please feel free to contact me directly with questions or thoughts.