ENGL 4920

Last Updated

  • Schedule of Classes - June 19, 2018 12:09PM EDT
  • Course Catalog - March 23, 2018 2:31PM EDT

ENGL 4920
Honors Seminar II

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2017-2018.

The purpose of the Honors Seminar is to acquaint students with methods of study and research to help them write their senior Honors Essay. However, all interested students are welcome to enroll. The seminar will require a substantial essay that incorporates literary evidence and critical material effectively, and develops an argument. Topics and instructors vary each semester.

When Offered Spring.

Permission Note Enrollment limited to: students in the Honors Program in English or related fields, or by permission of instructor.

Satisfies Requirement Seminar 102 may be used as one of three pre-1800 courses required of English majors.

View Enrollment Information

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Africa Writes Back

  •  7854 ENGL 4920   SEM 101

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  • What happens to the truth of fiction when two authors, each with a unique and sometimes opposing cultural and historical perspective, write about the same events? What if the two novelists are writing for different audiences and even different nations? In African literature one often finds African writers responding to European writers about their portrayals of colonialism and resistance. In this course, we shall be considering the “she said, he said” of African colonial and anti-colonial literature. For example, we shall look at the ways in which Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is a response to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and at the treatment of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe by J.M. Coetzee in his novel, Foe.

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Shakespeare: The Late Plays

  •  5854 ENGL 4920   SEM 102

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  • The course focuses on Shakespeare’s middle to late plays, from the “problem comedies,” through the great tragedies and romances. While we will pay particular attention to questions of dramatic form (genre) and historical context (including ways in which the plays themselves call context into question), the primary concentration will be on careful close readings of the language of the play-texts, in relation to critical questions of subjectivity, power, and art. On the way, we will encounter problems of sexuality, identity, emotion, the body, family, violence, politics, God, the nation, nature and money (not necessarily in that order).