Senior Honors Seminar

[DRAFT; some dates TBA]

Fall 2015

ENG 196A

Professor Alice Staveley

460-328

The Senior Honors Seminar supports and structures the early stages of researching and writing the year-long thesis project whose submission partially fulfills the requirements for awarding the “honors” designation to the baccalaureate degree. A completed thesis must be awarded a final grade of A- or A to achieve honors.

Writing a thesis will be one of the most rewarding, confidence building, and intellectually challenging experiences of your undergraduate career. It is truly a ‘laurel’ deserving of the honors suffix (Bachelor of Arts with Honors or BAH). It will also be a test of your endurance, emotional mettle, and dogged persistence as you work to articulate your “vision”, to surmount what Virginia Woolf describes as “that moment’s flight between the picture and [the] canvas” when the transport from conception to execution hangs in the balance.

But research, time and resources (library, people, department, advisors, friends, etc.) are on your side at this institution. They should teach you, in tandem with the solitariness of the project – and yes, research needs and demands much solitude – that the production of new knowledge is both a communal and an individual pursuit, the glories of achievement at once singular and shared.

The aim of the fall seminar is to inculcate the skills and strategies for sharing work, for making discoveries that carve inroads into your own project that are catalyzed by group presentation and peer review. The seminar aims to help you learn to think out loud about the progress of your research and to get feed back, theoretical, practical, and conversational, on how to make progress happen on a weekly basis. It is very important to establish and maintain research-driven work habits throughout the fall quarter: spring may seem months away, but in thesis-years, it is just around the corner.

BENCHMARKS AND REQUIREMENTS

HONORS YEAR ENGLISH

2015-2016

Fall Quarter

  • Honors Seminar MWF
  • MF: research strategies & critical article analysis
  • W: Pure Writing Time (with occasional speakers) in HUME WRITING CENTER 211. Directorial interventions limited to check-in on established weekly writing goals. Writing at Hume may be accomplished in the assigned classroom or you may choose to use the reading room or other available spaces in 250. Come prepared to write.
  • PERSONAL GOALS: Completion of Thesis Chapter Outline and one complete draft chapter, due end of quarter. Your honors seminar grade combines evaluation of these two written components (75%) and class participation (25%).
  • PUBLIC GOALS: Learning to be invested in other students’ intellectual aspirations as well as your own; learning to read articles outside your immediate area of interest for their own sake, and to help your peers’ in the knowledge acquisition process; learning to make unexpected connections or to hear fruitful dissonances between your project and others’; practicing the art of ‘radial reading’ – disparate essays that you make cohere – and reading for the sounds, structures, and styles of very different literary critical voices.

Winter Quarter

Primary oversight of your thesis in Winter and Spring Quarters rests with you, your primary advisor, and secondary reader. However, I will expect you to upload a SECOND DRAFT Chapter (or otherwise substantial piece of writing agreed upon by you and your advisor) early March [date TBA] to Coursework. If that is not forthcoming, I will be making inquiries. Remember always to simultaneously forward any work you’ve uploaded to Coursework to your PRIMARY ADVISOR for review and discussion. Always reply promptly to emails from your advisors inquiring about work or asking for an appointment to meet.

WINTER WINE AND CHEESES: Every second Thursday winter quarter 4-6 in Undergraduate Lounge. Stay Tuned! These are great opportunities to reconnect with your cohort and release thesis angst.

Spring Quarter

April 15 – Full Thesis DRAFT uploaded to COURSEWORK.

[Soon thereafter TBA]All members of the cohort will meet with me and in assigned groups throughout the day to rehearse aloud, in writing, the argument/discoveries of their thesis. This is meant to launch you into the final month of revising and editing your thesis in light of your known argumentative through-line. And to prepare for what you might present in the final department colloquium.

Mid-MAY (exact date TBA) – FINAL THESIS DUE by 4pm in Maile’s office. No extensions permitted.

[Soon thereafter]—Department Colloquium TBA.