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

Spring Term:

     9th week, Wednesday, May 23, Laird 212: comps meeting for juniors.

SENIOR YEAR

Fall 2012:

     3rd week: proposal

     7th week: research visit with Iris

     8th week: how to make a syllabus (with czars)

Winter 2013:

     2nd week: two arguments: how to do it (with czars) plus some setting up of peer review expectations

     7th week: draft of first essay, peer review

     8th week: draft of second essay, peer review

     8th week: colloquium with the czars

     9th week: more peer review

     10th week: turn in essays, group assessment

Spring Term:  

Students receive evaluations of their essays.  Revisions to essays, if required, due at noon April 29, 1013 (the beginning of 5th week). 

Saturday, May 11, 2013, on Second Laird:  Each group will deliver a public presentation at the English Comps Symposium.

 

Colloquium Topic:  Dangerous Writing, Dangerous Reading

Is literature dangerous? Can literature be dangerous under certain circumstances?  At various points, reading has been thought to endanger the morals or sensibilities of certain audiences, or to offer dangerous kinds of freedom.   Whether because they are sexually explicit or challenge political or social structures of the day, books are powerful instruments that can fall into the wrong hands.  Why is reading figured as dangerous?  What is it about books themselves (the artifacts) vs. the process of reading that makes them so?  What are the dangerous seductions of fiction?   Does reading involve risks different than watching a performance or a film?  What are the dangers of a reader mistaking the boundary between art and life?  What is more dangerous, reading together or reading alone?   Collective hysteria or solitary madness?

The Reading List

1.      Plato, The Republic, selections

2.      Sidney, The Defense of Poesy, selections (1595)

3.       Milton, Areopagitica, selections (1644)  

4.      Rochester, “On King Charles,” and “A Ramble in St. James’s Park” (1673)

5.      Lewis, The Monk (1796) 

6.      Douglass, selections from Narrative (1845)

7.      Whitman, selections from Leaves of Grass (1855)

8.      Stein, “Patriarchal Poetry” (1928)

9.      Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)  

10.    Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1991)

11.    Byatt, Possession, (1990)

12.    Hustvedt, The Blindfold (1992)

13.    Additional criticism TBA

 

The Alternatives List

The following works didn’t make the final cut, but they’d be worthwhile additions to any seminar on this topic.

·         Beaumont, Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607)

·         Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair (1614)

·         Samuel Richardson, Pamela (1740)

·         D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover  (1928)

·         Allen Ginsberg, Howl (1955)

·         James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (1956)

·         Salman Rushdie, Satanic Verses (1988)

·         Stephen King, Misery (film, 1990)

·         Paul Auster, City of Glass (2004, graphic novel version)

·         Spike Jonze, Adaptation (2002)

·         Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004)

·         Marc Forster, Stranger than Fiction (2006)