I just heard from Prof. McCoy that the English Honors Program is in danger of being condensed if there are not enough students interested in enrolling in the course, so I just want to do my part in publicizing the seminar. This program has been one of the highlights of my experiences as an English major at Queens College. I am currently in the honors seminar taught by Prof. McCoy where we examine literature with specific focus to the theme of love. It has been really great to delve into these texts and discourse about them with a really close-knit group of motivated students. I met a bunch of cool, new people and had some really insightful, interesting discussions with them. And I think the reason we were able to become so close and get to the level where we could comfortably question and critique each other’s arguments was because of the two semester system and it would be a real shame if the program had to be condensed to just one, so I really encourage all students to apply. Below I listed some of the necessary qualifications for English honors, the general requirements to take the seminar and the overall benefits.
Qualifications
1. English major
2. 3.3 GPA and 3.3 GPA in English
Program Requirements
1. Two-semester Honors seminar
2. A research project (roughly a 20 page paper)
3. Honors examination (close reading of 8 excerpts from British and American lit and a poetry essay)
4. Presentation of research at a student conference
Benefits
1. Small group of Honors students participating in intense discussions about one specific theme in literature
2. Students will graduate with Honors, High Honors, or Highest Honors, which will noted on transcripts. Designations are dependent on cumulative GPA, GPA in English, research project, and performance on honors exam
Next year’s seminar will be taught by Prof. Buell and will explore the theme of literature and technology. Below is a general course description:
Since the time of the beginnings of Anglophone literature, psyches, societies, places, environments and bodies have been dramatically reshaped, again and again, by technology. Indeed, that process is accelerating rapidly today; some even feel that we have long since passed the point we live in a natural or given universe and that we now. Instead, we dwell in a wholly artificial, and increasingly easily modified life-world—a life-world that has become a technosphere. Whether this is catastrophe or triumph is hotly debated.
In this class, we will focus on a long history of technological intervention and how, unebeknownst to many of us, literary culture has been conditioned by and responded to it. In fact, history’s accumulation of technologies and techniques arguably is one of the large, relatively unexamined and often unconscious foundations of our psyches, societies, and cultures. From the time English literature begins, people have been conditioned by a succession of in(ter)ventions, from gunpowder and printing to steam power, electricity, the automobile, television, computers, genetic technology, and robotics. But our growing technological unconscious is not just littered with a host of these specific interventions; some have tried to find order within it, arguing that we have gone through not just one, but two, three, or even four successive technological “revolutions”—i.e. larger systemic changes that come from an accumulation of many symbolic and literal synergies between society and sets of individual technologies.
We will consider how these in(ter)ventions and the synergies between them throw new light on not just historical, but also cultural change. From Renaissance humanism to postmodern simulation, new technological eras have provided ghostly companions to the eras mapped out by literary and cultural history. Also, individual texts are regularly responsive to, and a key part of society’s absorption of, technological change. Texts that reveal these parallels between infrastructure and imagination are extremely various. We will pick a limited number of poetic, fictional, non-fictional, and filmic texts to show how probing their technological unconscious greatly illuminates their human dramas and social significances, even as it intensifies our pleasure as readers of them.
Our course material may include some of following: Gawain and the Green Knight, Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, a play or two by Shakespeare, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Romantic and modern poetry, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Rebecca Harding Davis’ Life in the Iron Mills, Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, George Orwell’s 1984, Don DeLillo’s White Noise, the Wachowski Brothers’ The Matrix, and James Cameron’s Avatar.
For more information students can contact Prof. Buell in his office at Klapper 631 or email him at [email protected]. Applications are available in the English Department or via email.
