Honors Seminar in English—Writing Intensive

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 4996, 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"; and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper. Additional readings will be drawn from criticism of those works and (probably) The Craft of Research by Wayne C. Booth et al. (5th edition) and Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose by Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner.

Assignments will include: two short papers about two different critical debates; a fully developed proposal of the senior honors thesis; an annotated bibliography; and an oral presentation.