The English Department Honors Program gives our majors scope, during their senior year, for especially intense and independent work in English literature and language. The program begins in the fall semester with an Honors Seminar, limited to about fifteen students; all honors students are required to enroll in this seminar. In the spring semester, each student completes an honors thesis, a text written on a topic of their own choosing. The thesis is ordinarily an extended scholarly or critical essay, but majors in creative writing can submit extended work in prose or poetry as their thesis. While the fall seminar is intended to prepare and focus students for the in-depth work of writing an honors thesis, the possible topics for theses need in no way be bound to the seminar topic. Theses and creative manuscripts in the past have included "Seventeenth-Century Religious Poetry," "Star Wars," "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," "Angela Carter," "Ralph Waldo Emerson and Cultural Critique," "Motion: A Collection of Short Stories," and "Twelve Angry Wimmin: A One-Act Play" that was produced. All junior English majors are invited to apply.

Application forms are available in the English department office, Morey 404.  You may also download the application here or complete the application online.  Completed applications must be returned to the English department no later than Friday, March 9.  If you have any questions whatsoever about the seminar, please contact the Director of Undergraduate Studies.

In this course we will consider some major critical statements that help define the imaginative act of critique in fields like literary and media studies. We will consider the emergence of theory in the nineteenth and twentieth century, the work of Russian formalists and American New Critics, of the Frankfurt School and of Post-Structuralists, feminists and queer theorists, and others. Topics will include aesthetic pleasure and hermeneutic desire, social constructionism and the nature of truth, intention and form, what we mean by textuality and what we mean by reading. We will work with texts by Coleridge, Arnold, Nietzsche, Freud, Saussure, Schlovsky, Adorno, Wellek, Warren, Derrida, Butler, Sedgwick, and others. We will consider how these texts themselves constitute something of a critical tradition and how they differ among themselves. This course should be of interest and use to students in all tracks of the English Major.