Over the Summer
As you begin to wind down the semester, please consider that it is never too soon to be thinking about your Senior Essay topic for next year. Toward this end, it will be useful for you to gather all of the syllabi from your various English Courses in one place, collecting with them the various papers you have written as well. (Believe me, this tidy filing of your materials will come in handy as you move toward the oral exam at the close of your senior year.) As you do this, I suggest that you notice again those texts which were perhaps only "suggested" reading and that you think about exploring some of that reading over the summer. Look again, too, at those authors who won your attention and interest and think about re-reading one of their works, or perhaps reading for the first time one that you did not get to read for class discussion. Doing this will help you to discover the types of issues that may sustain a full examination in your senior year.
Remember, it is not necessary to write about an author or a period that you have already studied; at the same time, a timely review of those authors and periods might help you to find a topic that you will enjoy and it often leads to a return and rereading of material you have previously experienced.
If you give yourself a chance to review this material over the summer you will find that you will be more prepared to identify a topic in the first few weeks of class (and this is precisely when that happens as you talk over your ideas with various professors). Keep an eye out for a gathering of the English majors at the opening of the year. (This is something new we will do for your class.) At that gathering you will be given your official letter concerning Senior conference and we will begin the process in a more formal way.
If you have any questions about any of this you might ask a faculty member to give you some suggestions before you leave this year. The idea is to use everything. For example, the very process of exams and final papers at the close of this semester might give you some additional issues to pursue in a less stressful time over the summer. The idea is to gather these experiences in an effort to be still more comfortable with the major you have been making your own all along.
For your information, I am attaching a description of the type of things you will be asked to do to prepare for your oral exam at the close of your senior year. Look this over as you collect your papers this summer and you will be more than prepared for an exciting senior year.
Best,
Tina Zwarg, Chair
Oral Exam:
The second half-hour of the exam will focus on the course work you have done in English, and for this part of the exam we ask you to provide a list including at least two works from each English class you have taken--seven courses plus each semester of Junior Seminar. In addition to two literary texts from each half of Junior Seminar, your list should include two critical essays from each half (in many cases, these may be essays relevant to the primary works you have chosen, but this need not be the case). Important critical or theoretical sources used as class texts in other English courses are also pertinent. We define a "work" as a novel, play, or long poem (i.e. Paradise Lost); or set of at least three short stories; or at least four shorter poems "of reasonable complexity." For creative writing courses, you should include published literary materials that were used in class to discuss questions of craft, style, genre, etc.
Texts should be organized around three topics of your own devising, three "problems" which reflect your interests as an English major (see samples below). Each topic should encompass at least four works, including texts from two or more courses. Topics may overlap--a work you have associated with one topic might also appear under another.
Begin by giving some thought to the ways in which readings from one course speak to those from others.
Sample Topics:
The Art of Storytelling
All of the following narratives insist we think carefully about the process of storytelling itself--some of these are tales told in the first person, the rest are stories in which storytelling figures prominently in some other way (e.g., Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio with its host of compulsive narrators). What specifically do each of these texts tell us about storytelling and what might that mean to analysis of other important themes or structures of narrativity there?
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Mark Twain, Adventures of Hucklebury Finn
Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
Richard Wright, Native Son
Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior
Frank Kermode, "Secrets and Narrative Sequence"
Haunted Dwellings: Mind, Place, and Traumatic Memory
What is to be made of the haunted houses that loom in so many works of literature? What kinds of problems--aesthetic, psychological, social--do such images symbolize? Consider the role of architecture here, or of an inner and fractured geography, that is, how the shapes of particular houses, or the remains of a particular place, embody what Lawrence Langer has called "the ruins of memory." Consider, as well, the figurative discharge from the arc of correspondence between text and memory, between the habitable spaces recalled and revoked by these works and the enduring after-presence of trauma.
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, or Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
Shakespeare, Hamlet
Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines
Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems, ## (four or five poems chosen)
Gilbert and Gubar, "A Woman--White: Emily Dickinson's Yarn of Pearl," from their
The Madwoman in the AtticDaniel Schacter, "Emotional Memories: When the Past Persists," from his Searching for Memory
The Epiphany of Disillusionment
George Eliot cautions us in Middlemarch that we are all well-insulated in a kind of waking dream or daze, and that we are, perhaps too often, saved from the perception of an actual reality, one in which we might be made to hear the grass grow or the squirrel's heartbeat. She warns us that we "should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence." Choose four works in which the cross-over is inevitably envisioned, from blindness to sight (sight to blindness), from hope to hopelessness, or from illusion to "the morning after." Another term that might be useful here is anagnoresis, recognition.
Shakespeare, King Lear
Keats, The Odes
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Gospel of Mark
Poetic Convention
Poems come into existence by convening the forms through which they develop--"Yet once more, O ye Laurels, and once more..."--and yet they often develop by challenging those enabling structures-- "I come.../And with forc'd fingers rude,/Shatter your leaves." Convention appears, then, as both an authorizing and constraining habitus for poetic activity, encompassing both an objective, historical instrument of continuity with other poems and a medium of changing social and poetic values. Discuss this double-edged character of convention in a series of poetic texts that, taken together, constitute a dialogue on the opportunities, demands, contingencies, and limits of convention.
Shakespeare, Sonnets 18, 55, 73, 116, 129, 139
[or; Shakespeare, Prologues to Romeo & Juliet, Henry V, and Troilus & Cressida--in which case the question might have to be reworded, substituting'literary' for 'poetic,' etc.-?]
Milton, Invocations to Books 1,3,7,9 of Paradise Lost
Eliot, "The Wasteland"
Levertov, "Relearning the Alphabet"
Bloom , "Milton and his Precursors"
De Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality."
Poetic (Dis)Figuration
"Death is the mother of beauty." Stevens' apothegm enjoins us to consider poetry as arising from loss, establishing voice and purpose in the void or ruin of some desire, possession, presence, or belief. On this view, poems progress by locating figures both for this absent ideal and its substitutes, working at once to disclose and to close the wounds from which they arise. Discuss a representative group of poems as dialectics of violation and repair, disfiguration and refiguration, with especial attention to the substitutive play of tropes through which the poems evolve.
Spenser, "Mutability Cantos."
Milton, "Lycidas."
Wordsworth, "Intimations Ode."
Shelley, "Alastor."
Whitman, "Out of the Cradle."
Rossetti, "Monna Innominata."
Toomer, Poems from Cane
Ginsberg, "Howl."
De Man, "Autobiography as Defacement."