ENGL 4920 - Honors Seminar II

Spring. 4 credits.

Enrollment limited to: students in the Honors Program in English or related fields, or by permission of instructor. Seminar 101 may be used as one of the three pre-1800 courses required of English majors.

Seminar 101, C. Chase; Seminar 102, D. Schwarz.

Seminar 101: Engendering Genre in the Romantic Period in England

In this course we shall examine how established literary forms conformed to new purposes in the period between the French Revolution and the first Reform Bill (1789-1832). In this period, men and women writing in England appropriated the cultural authority and renewed the expressive power of genres ranging from closet drama to epitaph. We will study various types of poems—sonnets ballads, odes, elegies, inscriptions, etc.—by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson and others; Keats’s letters; drama by Byron and Joanna Baillie; a novel in letters, Desmond, and a novel by Austen, Persuasion. Required writing will be one twenty-page paper written in staged assignments (including a bibliography) and two oral reports, with a view to preparing students to write an honors thesis.

Seminar 102: Ulysses

A thorough episode-by-episode study of the art and meaning of Joyce’s Ulysses. We will explore how Ulysses redefines the concepts of epic and hero and how Joyce’s masterwork reflects literary modernism. We shall discuss how Ulysses raises major issues about the city, colonialism, and popular culture, and dramatizes what it means for the central character to be a Jew and an outsider in Dublin. We shall address Ulysses as a political novel, specifically, Joyce’s response to Yeats and the Celtic Renaissance. We shall also investigate the relationship between Ulysses and the other experiments in modernism, especially painting and sculpture. We will also examine Ulysses in the context of major issues in literary study and test various critical and scholarly approaches.