ENGL 4910 - Honors Seminar I

Fall. 4 credits.

Enrollment limited to: students in the Honors Program in English or related fields, or by permission of instructor. Seminar 102 may be used as one of three pre-1800 courses required of English majors.

C. Chase, P. Lorenz.

The purpose of the Honors Seminar is to acquaint students with methods of study and research to help them write their senior Honors Essay. However, all interested students are welcome to enroll. The seminar will require a substantial essay that incorporates literary evidence and critical material effectively, and develops an argument. Topics and instructors vary each semester.

Seminar 101: Women, Real and Imaginary: British Romanticism

How did women writers around 1800 use and change the images of women’s sexuality and creativity found in the “major” Romantics? Gender and individuality were newly constructed in literary genres flourishing in England at the time of the Revolution in France: the novel, drama, poetry, letters, and private journals. This seminar will focus on developing the skills in interpretation and critical writing essential for writing a successful Honors thesis in your Senior year. We will read John Keats as well as Jane Austen, and some works by the generation of writers they both relied on and reacted against. We will see how in British Romantic literature, re-imagining femininity was closely tied to a new sense of time and history.

Seminar 102: Blood Politics

Blood is everywhere. From vampire shows to video games, our culture seems to be obsessed with it. The course examines the power of “blood” in the early modern period as a figure that continues to capture our imagination, not only as a marker of racial, religious, and sexual difference and desire, but also as a dramatic player in its own right. How does a politics of blood appear on stage when populations are being expelled and colonized for reasons (mis)understood in terms of blood? In the course of trying to answer this and other questions of blood, we will read plays by Shakespeare, Webster, Kyd, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calderón de la Barca. Topics include honor, revenge, purity, the body, sexuality, conversion, and death.