Colloquium Comps

The Colloquium Comps option for the Senior Integrative Exercise offers students the chance to integrate the skills and knowledge they have acquired as English majors by reading, discussing in small groups, and writing about a list of works organized around a theme, topic, or literary question.  The list will draw upon works from the range of the major. 

CALENDAR & DEADLINES

JUNIOR YEAR:  (Late Spring Term – May 19, 2011):  The department will distribute a core list of 10-15 works, plus a few works of criticism. 

SENIOR YEAR

Fall Term: 

          (First 5 weeks):  Reading groups of 5-7 students will form and meet to agree upon a list of 2-4 complementary additions to the core list. 

           Noon, October 18, 2011 (Tuesday after midterm break):   Due date for each group to submit their list of additions to the core list, accompanied by a 1-page rationale for their selections. Turn in two paper copies of the list and the rationale in Laird 208.

Remainder of Fall & Winter Terms:  Each group reads and discusses its full list.  

Winter Term: 

           February 7, 2012 (Tuesday after midterm break):  Groups are presented with two essay topics from the department.

          February 13, 2012 (start of 7^th week):  Each group submits a proposed essay topic for consideration by the departmental advisors.

      February 20, 2012 (start of 8^th week):  Each group’s essay topics are approved.  All students begin writing two essays of approximately 10 pages each: one on their group’s question and the other on one of the two departmental questions.  At least one of the essays must address works from their group’s additions to the list. Students may not collaborate in the writing of their essays.

          March 9, 2012 (last day of classes):  Two essays due (2 copies) at 5 p.m. in Laird 208.  Do not put your name on your essays but only on cover sheets; put title of essay on both the essay itself and the cover sheet (as essays are read anonymously).

Spring Term:   Students receive evaluations of their essays.  Revisions to essays, if required, due at noon April 23, 2012 (at the beginning of 5th week). 

            Saturday, May 5, 2012, on Second Laird:  Each group will deliver a public presentation at the English Comps Symposium.

2011-12 Colloquium Reading List: The Animal

(Departmental Selections with Framing Questions)

In 2009, PMLA (the most prominent journal in literary studies) devoted an issue to theories of the animal, a subject that had already generated considerable interest in the preceding decade.  Contemporary developments in ethics, environmentalism, cognitive evolution, and broader theories of the “post-human” have driven some of this interest, and thinking about animals offers the chance to explore a series of interrelated and timely questions.  For example, what are the boundaries between human and animal? What does it mean to imagine the world from an animal’s perspective?  What does it mean to imagine animals as representations of other subject positions (e.g. race, gender, class)?  How are humans animals?  Is there anything that we owe animals or that animals owe us? 

Reading List:

[Lyric]

Anon., Old English riddles from the Exeter Book, trans. C. Williamson, #13 and  #36  (c. 975)

Robert Burns, “To a Mouse, On Turning Up Her Nest With the Plough” (1785)

Anna Laetitia Barbauld, “The Mouse’s Petition” (1773)

John Clare, “Mouse’s Nest” (c. 1832)

Elizabeth Bishop, “The Fish” and “The Man-Moth” (1946)

Maxine Kumin, “Woodchucks” (1972)

[Longer narrative]

Margaret Cavendish, Blazing World (1666)

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, Book 4 (1726)

H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896)

Virgina Woolf, Flush (1933)

Louise Erdrich, The Antelope Wife (1998)

Indra Sinha, Animal’s People (2007)

[Shorter narrative and non-fiction]

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Nun’s Priest’s Tale (c. 1400)

Henry David Thoreau, “Higher Laws” from Walden (1854)

Zora Neale Hurston, Chapter 6 from Mules and Men (1935)

George Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant” (1948)

[Drama]

Peter Shaffer, Equus (1973)

[Criticism]

Selections from PMLA 124.2