ENGL 4920 - Honors Seminar II

Spring. 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.

E. Hanson, M. Raskolnikov.

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: Oscar Wilde

“I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age,” Oscar Wilde once announced in a characteristically immodest, yet accurate, appraisal of his talent. With his legendary wit, his exuberant style of perversity and paradox, and his tendency to scandal, he has come to stand in symbolic relation to our own age as well, and for some of the same reasons he was a delight and a challenge to the Victorians. We will explore his poetry, essays, plays, letters, and fiction, in the context of the Aesthetic, Decadent, and Symbolist movements of the late-nineteenth century and also in the context of current debates in literary criticism and the history of sexuality.

Seminar 102: Not-Male in the Middle Ages

This course counts as one of the three pre-1800 courses required for the English major.

“Not-male” would be “female,” right? In pre-1400s Europe, no, not exactly. While this course centers on writings by, for, and about women, in the Middle Ages those excluded from the category “male” might also be saints, eunuchs, martyrs, people from other countries, and even Jesus Christ. We will read some indelibly strange and surprising works of medieval literature (mostly in translation, some in Middle English), and current scholarship on the history of how familiar-seeming notions like “gender,” “sex,” “holiness,” and “nation” developed in the Middle Ages. In this Honors seminar we will also discuss how to construct a sustained scholarly argument. The weak of stomach should be warned: this is not the Middle Ages of shy maidens in castles. Here be monsters.