ENGL 413 - Senior Research and Writing

Credits: 3
When Offered: Fall, Winter

Topics in Winter, 2010:

ENGL 413A: Senior Research and Writing: Literature and Human Rights (3).  A collaborative group research and writing project for senior majors, conducted in supervising faculty members’ areas of expertise, with directed independent study culminating in a substantial final project. Contemporary literature is riddled with stories of genocide, war, and the mass migration of peoples across international borders. What can novels, memoirs, and creative non-fiction contribute to our understanding of such human rights crises? What ethical and aesthetic challenges inhere in an author’s choice to speak on behalf of individuals, communities, and nations threatened by civil war, revolution, and foreign occupation? And to what standards of truth and art do we, as readers, hold this writing? In considering these questions, we spend the first half of this course reading contemporary literary dispatches (both fiction and creative non-fiction). Documentaries, visual art, and readings about international human rights policy enrich our classroom discussions. The second half of the course is devoted to individual research and writing projects, and students have the choice to expand their inquiries in a longer research paper. Darznik

ENGL 413B: Senior Research and Writing: Gender, Class and Sexuality in American Literature (3). Prerequisites: A collaborative group research and writing project for senior majors, conducted in supervising faculty members’ areas of expertise, with directed independent study culminating in a substantial final project. This capstone course studies gender, class and sexuality and their multifarious lives in the world of literature, represented here by works of selected authors predominantly writing in the last fifty years. Though this is not a theory course, we discuss key theoretical concepts necessary to the reading and evaluation of the assigned literary texts. We also look into the political, historical, cultural, theoretical, and literary concerns of these writers. As a literature class, we zero in on the styles, themes, modes, writing techniques, and literary devices embedded in the texts, and how these elements relate to and reinforce the identity politics of the texts and authors. Our goal is to see the power of literature to make interventions in critical discourses and to transform the many lives it seeks to represent and inevitably refashion. Possible authors include Dorothy Allison, Leslie Feinberg, Ursula LeGuin, Carla Trujillo, Jeanette Winterson, Audre Lorde, Junot Diaz, Tony Kushner. Miranda

ENGL 413C: Senior Research and Writing: Ritual, Religion and Drama (3). A collaborative group research and writing project for senior majors, conducted in supervising faculty members’ areas of expertise, with directed independent study culminating in a substantial final project. Is drama inherently ritualistic, even religious? While scholars speculate that ancient Greek drama evolved out of religious rituals, post-Reformation drama (including Shakespeare’s) often actively worked to minimize its religious content to avoid accusations of idolatry. The role of the body, especially the senses, in dramatic performance (and spectatorship) fosters much of the controversy surrounding its ritual elements; divergent attitudes towards those ritual elements continue even into modern and postmodern drama. The course begins with theoretical readings about ritual, performance, and religion. We then turn to examples of dramas from several religious traditions and from a wide chronological range in order to analyze the relationship among ritual, religion, and drama. Readings may include plays by Euripides, Kalidasa, Shakespeare, Eliot, Soyinka, Shanley, and others. Pickett

Topic in Fall, 2009:

ENGL 413A: Senior Research and Writing: Memoir (3). This course has two major parts, one historic and one creative. We begin with readings related to the rise of the autobiographical voice in English literature. We study early autobiographical texts, especially Augustine’s Confessions, and other self-writing of the early modern period, such as heresy trial accounts, spiritual autobiographies, diary entries, and travel narratives. As we read through these texts, we consider what experiences, as well as potential audiences, authorize writers to speak about themselves. Is it religious conversion, mistreatment by peers or authorities, prophetic revelation, observation of another culture, the desire to vindicate oneself before accusers, the need to account for one’s belief, or a privileged viewing of the bizarre or marvelous? We then move to modern autobiography and the personal essay, sampling a range of writers, such as George Orwell, Adrienne Rich, Mary McCarthy, Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, James Baldwin, and Frank McCourt. We focus more on writing strategies with these authors - what voice they use, what part of their lives they focus on, how they avoid complaint while still describing their suffering. At the same time, we work on our own autobiographical material, doing free writing based upon a series of exercises (i.e., recalling a first memory; recounting an experience of unjust treatment; recollecting events or feelings related to family photographs, etc.). A short research paper is required along with either a research paper on a chosen autobiographical text, either early or modern, or a creative, autobiographical piece.  Gertz

ENGL 413B: Senior Research and Writing: Lyric Poetry (3). Lyric poetry has been variously described as the “utterance that is overheard” (Mill), the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings…recollected in tranquility” (Wordsworth), and an “intensely subjective and personal expression” (Hegel). One of our oldest and most productive literary genres, the lyric is nevertheless notoriously difficult to define on account of its long and diverse history in Western literature. This course introduces students to the chief interpretative questions of contemporary lyric studies and surveys the function and construction of English lyric in several major historical periods. Particular attention is paid to the Metaphysical poets (e.g., Donne and Herbert) and the Romantics (chiefly Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads). At midterm, students commence independent research projects on lyric poets of their choosing and thereby direct our investigation of the genre’s changing face in both literary history and criticism.  Jirsa

ENGL 413C: Senior Research and Writing: Poetry and Community (3). How do people use poetry? How does poetry resist being useful? We read a series of poems and critical statements, mostly from the past fifty years, that investigate poetry’s role in education, in medicine, and in healing damaged communities. Students are required to volunteer two hours per week in a poetry-related service placement arranged by the Service Learning Coordinator. Student research projects, commenced at midterm, may spring from our joint readings, the service placements, or related topics in American, British, or Irish poetry. Wheeler