Honors Courses Fall 2024
ENGL 105: Honors Introduction to English - Haunted Literature
Instructor: Colleen Morrissey
19353 | MWF 10:00-10:50 AM | Wescoe 1009 - LAWRENCE
19818 | MWF 11:00-11:50 AM | Wescoe 1009 - LAWRENCE
In this course, we will examine the literature that haunts us. We will explore the concept of literary “horror”—what purposes it serves, what truths it exposes, what rules it breaks. We will read and analyze haunted genres such as erasure, surrealism, and the Gothic. Through our study of haunted literature, students will build their critical thinking, reading, research, and writing skills, learning to uncover the ways that literature, culture, and history co-define each other. Most importantly, students will explore how the written word—both others’ and their own—is a powerful force for creating and capturing even the most uncomfortable human realities. Class meetings will emphasize discussion while coursework will emphasize critical writing. Texts will include fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from writers such as Carmen Maria Machado, Emily Brontë, Edgar Allen Poe, and Shirley Jackson.
ENGL 105: Honors Introduction to English - World Literature
Instructor: Geraldo Sousa
18454 | TuTh 9:30-10:45 AM | Wescoe 4035 - LAWRENCE
This course will focus on a study of significant works of world literature. The primary aims are to develop reading and writing skills and to introduce students to the works of literature, as diverse as Charlotte Bronte’s 'Jane Eyre,' Willa Cather’s 'The Professor’s House,' and Jon Krakauer’s 'Into Thin Air,' texts drawn from a variety of genres and historical periods. We will explore journeys into the heart of the unknown through texts that represent experiences of navigating uncharted territories, embracing new experiences, and facing unfamiliar aspects of life. Such journeys often entail a quest for self-discovery, undergoing stages of personal growth, or the overcoming of challenges.
ENGL 105: Honors Introduction to English - Mythic Remakes/Epic Adaptations
Instructor: Sarah Van der Laan
28199 | TuTh 9:30-10:45 AM | Wescoe 4068 - LAWRENCE
A victorious hero, cast adrift on uncharted seas on his return from a cataclysmic war, struggles through unimaginable dangers and powerful temptations to return to the wife and home he left twenty years ago. The Odyssey—one of the oldest surviving works of European literature—continues to inspire films, plays, novels, poems, graphic novels, and artworks: war stories and love stories, postcolonial and feminist revisions, parodies and tragedies. We will explore the Odyssey and three contemporary adaptations: Caribbean poet Derek Walcott's stage adaptation for Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company, the Coen brothers' film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and Madeline Miller's recent novel Circe. We will ask why Homer’s tales of Troy, with their questioning of ideals of honor and glory, their awareness of the human cost of warfare, and their struggle to find heroism in human experience, remain necessary today. And we will engage with adaptation theory to discover how contemporary authors and directors reinvent myths for new audiences and examine the nature of adaptation itself.
ENGL 105: Honors Introduction to English - Modern Medievalism
Instructor: Prof. Misty Schieberle
19835 | TuTh 11:00-12:15 PM | Wescoe 4037 - LAWRENCE
Why is medieval literature such popular fodder for modern adaptations? Which medieval texts and topics led to works by Tolkien, G. R. R. Martin, and Margaret Atwood? This course uses medieval texts (in modern translations) and selected short modern adaptations to examine what it means to adapt foundational stories into works for new audiences. Coursework will consist of three mid-length essays (750-1000 words), some involving creative and playful approaches; there will be occasional quizzes and, I hope, frequent lively discussions. Texts: Heaney, Beowulf; various King Arthur and Merlin narratives; two medieval werewolf stories; Atwood, “Impatient Griselda”; selected excerpts from modern film and TV adaptations. We will use these works to practice writing in a variety of genres, including a traditional essay, an analysis of an adaptation, and an informative researched essay. Course requirements will also include regular class participation and short, informal assignments that prepare students to succeed on the major essays.
ENGL 105: Honors Introduction to English - Cultural Spaces
Instructor: Sonya Lancaster
20136 | MW 12:30-1:45 PM | Wescoe 4020 - LAWRENCE
This course will explore culture by examining three different spaces. The first unit will focus on the artistic space of the stage and use The Tempest to explore how staging a play can inform identity. The second unit will explore culture of home, using a Victorian novel and play and humor theory to explore the intersections of humor and class. The third unit will focus on the place of Lawrence, reading Braiding Sweet Grass to help us explore the culture of a place through personal experience, observation/interviews, and history.
The written work of this course will be comprised of three papers and a reflective final project. Students will also complete reflection journals and group activities for class and participate in discussions of the texts.
ENGL 105: Honors Introduction to English - Telling & Retelling
Instructor: Douglas Crawford-Parker
26515 | MW 3:00-4:15 PM | Wescoe 4023 - LAWRENCE
What might move a writer to answer, retell, or even rewrite a previous work? How do new literary works relate to older ones? This class will examine such questions by examining a select group of instances where authors rewrite, extend, or answer the work of an earlier writer.
How do writers relate to writers who have come before them? Why might a writer “rewrite” the work of an earlier writer? In this class we will explore multiple instances of writers responding to the works of earlier writers, beginning by reading two essay pairs written decades apart but which share the exact same title. We will then focus on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein from 1818 and a number of the countless responses to that novel since then.
As we work our way through these texts, reading them closely and discussing them analytically, we will also engage how to write the kind of argumentative, analytical assignments that are often central in college classes. Coursework includes three papers, a final project where students will have their own opportunity to do a rewrite, weekly posts in Microsoft Teams, and other regular short writing exercises in and out of class.
ENGL 205: Ways of Seeing
Instructor: Mary Klayder
20529 | MWF 10:00-10:50 AM | WES 4020 - LAWRENCE
17730 | MWF 11:00-11:50 AM | WES 4020 - LAWRENCE
The course will focus on the concepts of perception, perspective, and vision in literature. How do we see things? How do we view the world? How does literature show our different ways of seeing? We will consider different perceptions of art, nature, gender, race, and culture; we will investigate various cultural and personal perspectives; and we will address the notion of vision as a metaphor in literature. In addition to literary texts, we will look at how other disciplines intersect with literature regarding these issues. There will be three critical papers, a final exam, a perception project, and assorted playful response assignments throughout the semester. Texts: Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By; Donne, Selected Poetry; Dickinson, The Collected Poems; Edson, Wit; Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Woolf, To The Lighthouse; Haig, The Midnight Library; and selected essays and poetry handouts.
ENGL 598: Honors Proseminar - The Rhetorics & Politics of Horror
Instructor: Pritha Prasad
21185 | MW 12:30-1:45 PM | Wescoe 4037 – LAWRENCE
In this seminar, we will discuss and interrogate the ways horror has been used in film and television to forward political and cultural commentary, particularly surrounding identity and power (i.e. race, gender, class, nation, and dis/ability). We will cover a range of historical and contemporary examples of horror film and television, focusing specifically on subgenres like racial horror, feminist horror, body horror, and psychological horror. We will supplement and contextualize our analyses of these texts with interdisciplinary readings from film and media studies, rhetorical criticism, critical race theory, feminist and queer studies, and popular culture studies. What makes something “scary,” and how might dominant fears and anxieties be underpinned by gendered, racialized, sexualized, and/or ableist cultural narratives? As a genre that uniquely relies upon the creative, multimodal use of visual, aural, spoken, and textual elements, what kinds of “arguments” does horror make about culture, politics, society, and history? Throughout the semester, students will be required to complete regular reading and viewing assignments, as well as a series of writing assignments, including a final analytical research paper.
ENGL 599: Honors Essay
Instructor: Mary Klayder
14663 | By Appointment | LAWRENCE
