ENGL 4910 - Honors Seminar I

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: Moving Stories: Fictions of Migration from Across the World

This course will study recent novels about migration and life as a refugee.  We will read novels by authors writing about migration in and from Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia as well as a few canonical novels about migration such as Willa Cather’s My Antonia and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. As part of our course work we will also carefully study the visual art of global migration in conjunction with a special exhibit on migration at the Johnson.  We will ask how movement shapes the moves a novelist makes and how visual artists approach the problem of forced migration differently from writers.