Honors Courses Fall 2025
ENGL 105: Honors Introduction to English - Telling & Retelling
Instructor: Doug Crawford-Parker
19344 | MWF 11:00-11:50 AM | Wescoe 4020
26107 | MWF 12:00-12:50 PM | Wescoe 4037
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 four novels that tell and retell their stories. 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 105: Honors Introduction to English - Murder, They Wrote
Instructor: Megan Dennis
27606 | TuTh 9:30-10:45 AM | Strong 334A
27607 | TuTh 12:30-1:45 PM | Wescoe 4076
How do we understand representations of crime and victimhood in literature and culture? Representations of crime, victims, and suspects have broader implications for the ways we understand embodiment, social mores, and justice. Crime and detective stories have retained a foothold in the Western imagination since the days of Edgar Allen Poe’s Dupin and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. These texts hold us in suspense, while also revealing anxieties among society’s members, particularly regarding containment of behavior and identities society deems improper or dangerous. Through critical engagement with literature across a variety of genres and time periods, this course will delve into the realm of crime literature as a means to interrogate the dominant frameworks in which we live. Students can expect to engage with such works as Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Louise Erdrich’s The Round House, as well as true crime cases presented in popular podcasts such as My Favorite Murder (and others.) Our writing assignments will include some shorter reading responses/ in-class writing activities, as well as three major writing projects and a final reflection.
ENGL 105: Honors Introduction to English - Connecting Food Studies and English Studies
Instructor: Mary Jo Reiff
19071 | TuTh 11:00-12:15 PM | Wescoe 4076
The application of cooking to rhetoric and writing has its roots in classical rhetoric, dating back to Plato’s Gorgias, in which Socrates aligns rhetoric with cookery, noting that cooking is a routinized practice that is experiential and embodied—much like writing. In Writing Studies, scholars have drawn on the metaphor of “cooking” to discuss writing processes, drawing comparisons between cooking and writing as generative action and interaction and as activities that are both active and reflective. In this course we will read together perspectives on cooking as inquiry, along with studies of the rhetoric of cookbooks, the rhetoric of food writing, and the genre of recipes—as reflective, in particular, of women’s literacies, memory, and identities. We will also extend our focus on cooking into food literacies, with a focus on reading food literature (exploring character and culture through food), writing food memoirs and autobiographies, and researching and writing about food—and how this focus can enable exploration of affect and emotions through cross-cultural culinary encounters. Students will complete their own food memoir, will research food and its cultural associations/ misappropriations (along with completing a photo essay review), and will create their own stories around a meaningful family recipe or kind of food—and will contribute to a collaborative class project: a digital cookbook. Texts for the class will be available online.
ENGL 105: Honors Introduction to English - Exploring the Culture of Spaces and Places
Instructor: Sonya Lancaster
27439 | MW 2:00-3:15 PM | Wescoe 4076
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 middle-class Victorian/Edwardian homes, using a 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. Required Texts: Kimmerer, Robin, Braiding Sweetgrass; Shakespeare, William, The Tempest, and Wilde, Oscar The Importance of Being Earnest.
ENGL 205: Haunted Literature
Instructor: Colleen Morrissey
27604 | MWF 10:00-10:50 AM | Wescoe 4023
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. We will also examine how other media—film, graphic art, etc.—interact with literature to create haunting art. Class meetings will emphasize discussion while coursework will emphasize critical writing. Texts will include fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from writers such as Helen Oyeyemi, Emily Brontë, and Shirley Jackson.
ENGL 205: Myth & Adaptation
Instructor: Sarah Van der Laan
27605 | TuTh 9:30-10:45 AM | Wescoe 4021
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, graphic novels, poetry, and art: war stories and love stories, postcolonial and feminist revisions, parodies and tragedies. We will study the Odyssey and three contemporary adaptations—Caribbean poet Derek Walcott's stage adaptation, the Coen brothers' film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and Madeline Miller's recent novel Circe—and examine the nature of adaptation itself through critical and theoretical readings. 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. We will discover how contemporary authors and directors reinvent myths for new audiences, and how they insist on the social and cultural power of storytelling. Students will engage in class discussion, write critical papers, and have the opportunity to create their own adaptation.
ENGL 598: Honors Proseminar: Setting the Stage – Contemporary Drama
Instructor: Darren Canady
20189 | TuTh 2:00-3:15 PM | Wescoe 4037
Theatres and theatre-companies everywhere engage in a nearly year-round process of reading scripts, meeting playwrights, engaging audiences, and refining their mission statements as they work towards building theatrical seasons that invigorate spectators and keep theatre fresh and vital. In this class, students will explore recent scripts premiering at stages around the country to get a sense of what stories theatres are finding compelling, how scripts are analyzed for production, and how contemporary drama is reflecting the society in which they live. The semester will culminate in a project in which students form theatre companies and program and present a season of their own design.
