I have written a lot of posts about the QC English Honors program so I thought it would be a good idea to write a blog entry on the advantages of being part of this unique community. As an honors program it is restricted to students who have both a cumulative and English major GPA of 3.3 or higher. Members also have several responsibilities they must fulfill such as: 1) enrolling in a two-semester seminar in senior year; 2) writing a 20-page thesis paper; 3) completing the Honors Exam; and 4) participating in a student conference. This list of obligations might make joining the English honors program seem a bit daunting, but while reflecting on my experiences this past year, I realized how much I have grown and learned in the process as well as how much I enjoyed both the seminar and the rich intellectual community it fostered.
The topic for my senior seminar, taught by Professor Richard McCoy, was “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” When I first realized that this amorphous and oftentimes elusive emotion would be the focus of our year-long seminar, I was honestly not very excited because “Love” is so ubiquitous an emotion and yet, frustratingly difficult to define. I thought that it would be an unproductive and fruitless endeavor to identify the nature of “Love” because the emotion is inherently subjective, but taking this class has shown me how valuable it is to examine “Love” as a topic simply because it is so often overlooked in critical debates… and while developing my semester project on David Hwang’s M. Butterfly I really felt like I was able to contribute a new perspective on the play by re-assessing it from the critical perspective of love, which was a nerdy but nonetheless invigorating experience.
In addition to intellectual stimulation, there are also a lot of practical advantages of being part of the honors program. For instance, those of you interested in sprucing up your resumes, would be happy to know that you can graduate from the program with Honors, High Honors, or Highest Honors, depending on three factors: 1) your cumulative and major GPA; 2) your performance on the Honors Exam; and 3) your thesis paper.But even though the degree of “Honors” you graduate with is important, what I found most valuable about taking the seminar was being part of a tight-knit community of students. Working closely together with other English majors over the course of an entire year allowed for intellectual and personal bonds to develop that really enriched my undergraduate experiences at Queens College. Finally, participating in the seminar and developing your own research project can also prepare you for the future, especially those students considering a career in teaching or academia.
The culmination of our efforts in the program is a student conference, being held this year on Wed. May 5 from 11:00am-1:30pm in the Rosenthal Library (Presidential Conference Room 2). Anyone interested in the topic of “Love” or the English honors program is welcome to come and should spread the news to friends and family. Be sure to tell them that a reception and free food will follow the event and that we are all working really hard to make it a great success!
Hopefully my post has interested some of you in joining the honors program. Next year’s seminar is on literature and technology, which sounds like an amazing topic. The class will be taught by Professor Buell and below is his course description: (Comment or contact me if you have any questions about my experiences or the program in general)
ince 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.
One final note: you DON’T need to be a technological enthusiast to thrive in this course. If you are someone who feels just the opposite—who is deeply put off by both technologies and peoples’ enthusiasm for them—you will have just as much fun in this class.
