Contact advisor Mary Moore for consent.

This course is the first part of the two-semester Honors sequence in the English Department, and is intended to lead into the second part, the writing of the Honors senior thesis (English 4995, taken in the Spring).

This course introduces students to literary debates, literary research methods, and the writing of literary research. Focusing on a set of canonical works that have generated much debate and even controversy, students will explore how literary critics and scholars conduct critical debates. This in turn will give students insight into the nature of scholarly disagreement and will help them situate their own critical voices within a broader academic conversation. The focus on literary research methods will help them locate relevant primary and secondary materials for their own research, both for this class and for the Honors senior thesis in the spring.

The focal works will likely include: Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (Part 4); William Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey"; John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn"; Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper; and possibly other short texts. Additional readings will be drawn from criticism of those works as well as The Craft of Research by Wayne C. Booth et al. (5th edition) and Style: Toward Clarity and Grace (also titled Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace) by Joseph M. Williams.

Writing assignments will include two short papers about two different critical debates; one of these will be expanded into a long research paper, which be approached in several stages: a proposal, an annotated bibliography, and an initial draft.