DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
SENIOR INTEGRATIVE EXERCISE 2008-2009

“Comps is only one of the requirements in the major, but it is the one which is supposed to help the student understand the rationale behind all the others.”
—Owen Jenkins (Carleton English Department, 1954-97)

A BRIEF HISTORY OF “COMPS”

You have no doubt heard much about “Comps” during your years at Carleton, but may nevertheless still be uncertain about precisely what it is or what it’s for. Some of the mystique of Comps may be dispelled by a little history. In days of yore, Carleton seniors sat a “Comprehensive Examination” designed to test their competence across the entire field in which they had majored. The enormous expansion and increasing compartmentalization of disciplinary knowledge during the twentieth century eventually rendered the ideal of comprehensiveness untenable, and towards the end of the century Carleton responded by trying to find ways to reinvent the exercise. In one version it was recast as an “Integrative Exercise,” designed to help seniors find connections between disparate courses, though without any longer striving for comprehensiveness. In another, it was re-imagined as independent research on a narrowly defined topic. Looking around campus, you will find versions of the exercise that draw on some or all of these historical iterations. Thus, for instance, the current edition of the college Catalog endorses the second version, arguing that Comps is designed “to help students relate the subjects they have studied in their major field,” while the Academic Regulations and Procedures defines it more loosely as “a capstone experience.” Meanwhile, the ghost of the original ideal continues to haunt us in the colloquial term by which the exercise will probably always be known: “Comps.” Both of the recent versions—integrative exercise and capstone experience—are alive and well in the English Department, as the Exam and Essay Options.

THE TWO OPTIONS

The core of the Exam Option is the process of study (in self-selecting student groups) of the selected work on the “Comps list” during Fall and Winter Terms. The exam itself—which asks students to demonstrate their knowledge of specific content of works on the list as well as their skill in practical criticism, interpretation, and persuasive rhetoric—takes place over the first weekend of Spring Term. The Essay Option involves the research, composition, shaping and polishing of a 30-40 page essay that poses a significant literary question and sustains for its duration a strong and clearly argued thesis, buttressed by research in carefully chosen primary and secondary texts. Essays are submitted at the end of Winter Term.

Whatever else may be said about it, the provision of two options gives you the advantage of choice, and the opportunity to play to your strengths. You owe it to yourself to give careful consideration to each one. You might begin by weighing your intellectual temperament, appetites, and strengths. Do you learn best through group discussion, or through private rumination? Are you are a skater or a diver? Is writing, for you, a means to an end, or a craft at which you love to work? In the Exam Option, you will work collaboratively with other students, mastering the works on a set list of representative texts drawn from across the sub-fields of the discipline, and then write an exam on those works. In the Essay Option, you will work independently to research a focused literary topic and write a long essay.

Please click on the links below for detailed descriptions and deadlines.

Pierre Hecker (Laird 201, phecker@carleton.edu, x4489)
Office Hours Fall 2008: M W: 2:00-3:00 PM; T Th: 3:00-4:00 PM and by appointment

Jessica Leiman (Laird 207B, jleiman@carleton.edu, x4326)
Office Hours Fall 2008: M: 2:15-3:15 PM;T: 3:00-4:30 PM