ENG 450: Senior Seminar

All English majors are required to take the Eng 450: Senior Seminar course during their senior year.

Though seminars vary in focus and content, each addresses its subject in the context of current critical discourse and requires students to write a long research-based paper.

Registration for the seminars are handled through the English department administrator and are conducted one year in advance, with majors being notified of seminars offered and registration procedures, during their junior year.

All English majors should meet with their advisors during their sophomore year to review seminar prerequisites and registration requirements, especially if they are considering studying overseas during the fall of their junior year, graduating mid-year, or have other special needs.

Registration for the 2009-2010 senior seminars will begin at 9:00 am on Monday, February 2, 2009. Information regarding seminars, professors, and registration dates will be emailed to you on January 27.

Prerequisites: English 205 and 206 must be completed prior to taking the seminar.

• Student must have senior status and have completed a minimum of 93 credits (senior status) by the beginning of the Fall 2009 semester.
• Each seminar is limited to twelve students and enrollment will be on a first-come, first-served basis.
• Any registration/course selection sent before 9:00 am on Monday, February 2, 2009 will be returned.

To register: Contact Debbie Richman, Miller Center for the Humanities - 4th Floor, by e-mail at  drichman@lclark.edu, or fax at 503-768-7418, and provide her with:

1. Name
2. Seminar title
3. Student ID #
4. Campus mailbox #
5. Email address

Please include a second and third choice when you register (by email or fax), since the department will need an alternate in case the seminar you select fills before we receive your request.

2009-10 Senior Seminars

Fall Semester 2009

Eng 450-01: Authors & Scribblers
Professor: W. Pritchard
MW 11:30-1pm

“…he was therefore obliged to seek some other means of support and, having no profession, became by necessity an author.”
-- Samuel Johnson, The Life of Richard Savage (1744)

Michel Foucault wrote a famous essay asking “What Is an Author?” This course asks instead, what was an author? What did it mean to be an author in the early eighteenth century? Were authors estimable or contemptible? Why were some authors so intent on deriding others as mere “scribblers?” Why did many think it unseemly to print and sell one’s writings? Was authorship a profession or, as Johnson implies, “no profession?”

There are no simple answers to these questions, because authorship was fiercely contested at this time. The years 1700-1750 saw a clash between two incompatible versions of authorship. The classical and Renaissance model of the author, a more or less independent gentleman who wrote in his spare time for friends and for posterity, was being challenged by a distinctly modern model, the author-for-hire who wrote and printed hastily to support himself or herself. This conflict, taking place within an England already divided along party and gender lines, produced a split between “the Ancients” (the self-styled inheritors of Homer, Horace and Virgil) and “the Moderns” (derided by their foes as “scribblers” and “hacks”).

In this seminar we will read authors from both camps, looking at how they positioned themselves in relation to their predecessors and contemporaries. Our goal will be to understand and appreciate the peculiar literary culture of early eighteenth-century Britain, to revisit its petty quarrels and to admire its lasting achievements. We will pay particular attention to two of the strangest, most fascinating and most challenging works of the age: Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub (1704) and Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad Variorum (1729). These works mock “the Modern way of writing” (as Swift termed it) but also tap into its novelty and vitality. Additional authors will include Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Henry Fielding, Richard Savage and Samuel Johnson.

Students will work towards a final, 20-25 pp. essay that draws on primary and secondary sources.

Eng 450-02: Readings in British Modernism: Lawrence and Mansfield
Professor: R. Zimring
TTH 11:30-1 pm

We will focus on two great modernist experiments with fiction-writing: the works of D.H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield, who innovatively imagined and to some extent re-invented the conditions and possibilities of intimacy in the early 20th century. They used fiction to explore family life, sexuality, and friendship as realms of dramatic conflict as well as of pleasures both captivating and subtle. Our consideration includes most or all of Mansfield’s short stories, and several of Lawrence’s major novels, including Women in Love. To frame our discussions, we will approach these authors from a variety of theoretical perspectives in order to define and understand genre (short story and novel), gender, eroticism, the surreal, the primitive, and the comic. Exploration of intellectual backgrounds will involve charting some key influences, such as Anton Chekhov’s and Jane Austen’s on Mansfield, and Sigmund Freud’s on Lawrence.

Weekly written reflections are required for the first four weeks of the seminar; thereafter, assignments will work towards the completion of a major 25–30 page final essay, and include a proposal, annotated bibliography, and oral presentation. Summer reading is also required, accompanied by a writing assignment due the first day of class.

Eng 450-03: Hawthorne
Professor: R. Cole
TTH 1:50-3:20pm

Nathaniel Hawthorne is among the most canonical of American authors. He is also one of the most bizarre. If his spooky stories represent American literature, they are a testament to the deep weirdness of American thought. We will pursue this weirdness through three major novels (The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, and The Blithedale Romance) and a number of short stories. Discussion topics may include Hawthorne’s fascination with history and the notion that one’s fate is determined by the past, his ideas about technology and its dangers, his interest in Puritan theology, his commitment to fantastic and curiously literal metaphors, and his political conservatism.

Each student will pursue an individual seminar project of his or her own design. The project will culminate in a 20-page seminar paper that positions an original treatment of one of Hawthorne’s works in the context of current critical conversations. Preparatory assignments will include close readings and an annotated bibliography. In the final days of the semester we will hold a mock colloquium, with students presenting their projects to their colleagues in the class.