ENGL 4920 - Honors Seminar II

Seminar  101: Lyric Poetry and Language

What are lyric poems made of? Feelings, ideas, sunsets, skylarks, red wheelbarrows? Or are poems made, essentially, of language-words arrayed in lines, sentences, stanzas, patterns, rhythms, fixed forms and free variations? Do a poem’s words match, maul, or mystify everyday words? This Honors Seminar ponders these questions through attentive reading, discussion, and writing about poems from the Renaissance to the present (Shakespeare, Donne, Marvell, Coleridge, Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, A.E. Stallings) and commentary on poems and poetic language by responsive readers (Sidney, Wordsworth, Oscar Wilde, William Empson, Josephine Miles, Barbara Johnson). Creative exercises, critical papers, work on research methods in preparation for the Honors essay. Anyone intrigued by these questions is welcome, including lovers of good fiction who feel less sure how to enjoy poetry.

Seminar 102: Literature and Technology

Since the industrial revolution, writers and readers have often thought of literature as the special preserve of the human, an antidote to an ever more technological world. But as technology is increasingly associated with electronic media, it is easier to imagine the relationship of literature to technology as a collaboration rather than an antagonism. One aim of this class will be to explore the character of literature in the age of electronic media. But we will also explore a deeper set of connections between literature and technology, reconsidering our assumptions about both terms to ask if literature is, and has always been, a technology. Readings in literature, philosophy, and theory may include works by Homer, Dickens, Cavendish, West, Whitehead, Hansen, Plato, Benjamin, Heidegger, Williams, Latour, Haraway.