ENG 4001: Senior Colloquium

Abstract

This course provides students majoring in English with a culminating, “capstone” experience, which forges links between your previous courses while directing you towards new paths of inquiry. Concluding with a Senior Final Paper and Oral Presentation, this semester-long course explicitly links the gateway course (English 2010, Interpreting Texts) with other courses in the major by creating and following connections among texts, genres, cultural contexts, and critical perspectives. In this way, we hope you will consider your own stake in the ongoing conversation of literary studies, the questions the drive your interest in the field, and the ways in which you might carry your intellectual pursuits into the future. The course joins students and faculty in dialogue around texts and the interpretive practices that contextualize them, while enhancing community among English majors through its collaborative nature. Each student will have the opportunity to lead a session, also facilitated by a member of the English department faculty. OVERVIEW  We will meet as a group with English Department faculty to discuss primary texts, ranging in genre and media, period, and national literature. We will also read together a set of secondary, critical readings. This semester, many of our texts will be focused on race.  Each student will lead a face-to-face session, steering the discussion in a number of crucial ways, including by locating additional secondary sources and initiating and moderating discussions.  To prepare for, deepen, and extend face-to-face sessions, you will also participate in Online Discussions and Reflections about the primary and secondary sources using Canvas. We will not meet every week of the semester, but you will have assignments every week.  At the end of the semester, you will write a final paper of not more than ten pages, which you will present to two faculty members in your oral exam. Following your presentation, you will be asked questions relating to works from the course and beyond. This oral exam is an opportunity for you to reflect expansively on the entirety of your experience as an English major. ___ The revised Colloquium will be a 3-credit course for both Literary Studies and Creative Writing students, taking place in online and face-to-face sessions in a single semester. Each of the sessions will focus on a work of literature and at least one modern refashioning of it, whether through film, fiction, graphic novel, or another art form. Students will respond to these works through a variety of prompts that will elicit both traditional literary analysis and other forms of creative expression over the course of the semester. Students will also be responsible for leading discussion in at least one session. At the end of the semester, students will submit a written paper that they will then present to faculty examiners in a discussion in which they will be asked to reflect more synthetically on the work of the Colloquium. As with the other writing prompts, they will have a variety of options for the form that this final paper takes, from traditional literary analysis to other forms of creative writing. Required of all English majors with senior standing. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours