ENGL 413 - Senior Research and Writing

Credits: 3
Planned Offering: Fall, Winter

Topics for Fall 2011:

ENGL 413-01: Senior Research and Writing: Prize-Winning Contemporary Fiction (3). This seminar studies current trends in contemporary fiction by focusing on novelists and short story writers who have won the Pulitzer or Nobel Prizes over the past two decades. We begin by exploring the histories of the prizes and their recipients, then go on to study selected authors’ lives and careers before examining their work. Reading with an eye toward technical innovation, political context, and moral questions, we ask what constitutes prizeworthy writing. Authors may include Paul Harding, Marilynne Robinson, Doris Lessing, Junot Diaz, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jhumpa Lahiri, Jose Saramago, Jeffrey Eugenides and Toni Morrison, among others. Students sample other prizewinners and Pulitzer finalists of their choice, and nominate their own lists of prizeworthy authors. Each student produces a research paper on a writer outside the syllabus. Brodie

ENGL 413-02: 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 evolution in both literary history and criticism. Jirsa

Topics for Winter 2012:

ENGL 413-01: Senior Research and Writing: Strategies in Fiction (3). Students in this course combine the analysis of fiction with fiction writing by studying a range of short story writers in order to define signature elements of craft and then reproduce those elements in their own stories. Writing includes both short stories and analytical essays, each focused on the same elements of craft. There are a shared set of 20th-century texts, but students also have some freedom in selecting authors to study. Gavaler

ENGL 413-02: Senior Research and Writing: Major and Minor (3). Ever since Aristotle’s Poetics, the very first formal study of literature, the imposition of hierarchies has marked the long tradition of judging, criticizing, and appreciating individual texts. These hierarchies sometimes take the form of assertions that some genres (epic or tragedy) are higher or more worthy than others (pastoral or comedy), sometimes that certain modes (realism) should be privileged over others (romance), sometimes that particular styles (difficulty) deserve more careful study than others (simplicity), sometimes that one nation’s system of production (French film) is more artistic and less commercial than another’s (American film), and sometimes even that members of one gender (men) are more likely to produce important literature than the members of the other (women). This capstone documents, questions, and just plain wonders about this deeply entrenched phenomenon. In the first half of the course, we scrutinize some of its most important examples from Aristotle and Horace through Edmund Burke, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Andrew Sarris before turning to one or two important case studies. In the second half, students explore whatever instances of this phenomenon they find most appealing or worthwhile. Adams

ENGL 413-03: Senior Research and Writing: The Mosaic of Memoir (3). This capstone course studies the genre of Memoir in all its mixed-genre glory. Memoir is a mosaic form, utilizing bits and pieces from autobiography, fiction, essay and poetry in ways that allow the author to muse (speculate, imagine, remember and question) on their own life experiences. Modern literary memoir requires tremendous work from both author and reader, as the narrative moves both backward and forward in time, re-creates believable dialogue, switches back and forth between scene and summary, and controls the pace and tension of the story with lyricism or brute imagery. Like a mosaic, memoir is about the individual pieces as much as the eventual whole. Students study the literary constructions of contemporary memoir as well as produce short pieces themselves, in order to better understand the genre from the inside out. Authors may include Danticat, McCourt, Grealy, T.T. Williams, Bechdel, Kingston, Wolff, Wallis, Allison, Silko, Karr. Miranda

ENGL 413-04: Senior Research and Writing: Ecocriticism (3). In this course, we investigate the relationship between nature and culture through a focus on literary theory. Readings in the history of literary theory lead to discussions of themes such as textual recovery, literary history, genre, cultural geography, material culture, ecofeminism, and environmental justice. We also use an anthology of environmental literature to build our knowledge of primary texts. The possibilities for research projects are numberless, and students are guided toward projects that join theoretical concerns with literary texts. We work together as a study group, but each student produces a research paper on a topic of individual interest. Warren