ENGL 4910 - Honors Seminar I

Fall. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Enrollment limited to: students in the Honors Program in English or related fields, or by permission of instructor. Seminar 101 may be used as one of three pre-1800 courses required of English majors.

B. Correll, K. Attell.

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: Shakespeare and Marlowe

This honors seminar brings together two of the most striking and influential writers of the early modern period. Pairing and comparing their work introduces questions not only about their sensational lives and texts but also about power (including the power of classical authority), gender/sexuality, literary influence and the work of cultural adaptation. The only prerequisite for the course is an adventurous mind; no previous exposure to the authors is assumed. For students who are familiar with Shakespeare, the goal of this course is to establish a larger cultural and literary context for close and critical study of both writers. We will include some film, as another kind of adaptation, and there will be some reading in (translated) primary sources: Ovid, Virgil, Plutarch.

Seminar 102: American Paranoia

Following the lead of Richard Hofstadter’s classic 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” this course will examine the “paranoid style” in contemporary American fiction and film. The paranoias and plots we will encounter vary considerably (personal paranoias, political conspiracies, governments turned enemy, surveillance technology run amok, apocalyptic-millennial paranoia). Yet when viewed together they seem to cohere as a distinct style within post-WWII American narrative. We will ask how paranoid style responds to the contemporary American context and how the fears dominating these narratives shape their aesthetic form. Why has paranoia arisen as such a distinctively American attitude? What is the paranoid afraid of? (Should we be paranoid, too?) Novels by Nabokov, Pynchon, Reed, Dick, DeLillo, Didion, Roth; films by Coppola, Romero, Bigelow, Baldwin.