English Honors
By way of introduction, here is the explanation of my desire to pursue Departmental Honors I provided when applying in the Spring.
The Honors Seminar could not have lived up to the expectations outlined in my personal statement any more than it did. It's difficult to express just how wonderful it was meeting with an intimate group of peers twice a week to simply discuss literature. We sat in a circle and for two hours, we would have a conversation going non-stop, with hardly any prompting from Professor Kaplan. There was a palpable energy in the room, and it was something truly special to be surrounded by individuals who were not participating for the sake of a grade, but because they had a genuine passion for the academics. It's incredible how little I learned from my professor in comparison to how much I have learned from my peers. Their insights and academic backgrounds inspired me on a daily basis to work even harder, to think even more critically as I read our texts and formulated discussion questions, so that I could come to class fully prepared to engage with them. English Honors is the first time I've felt truly "collegiate" since coming to the University of Washington, truly getting that sense of academia and enlightenment and enrichment that higher education promises. I wish that every class could be like this,
What I did not foresee was that my enchantment with English Honors would extend beyond the classroom, because throughout the course of the quarter, I ended up making some of the best friends I have ever had. What started as most of us going to coffee after class once has exploded since then to us becoming the "Honors Crew". Now we go out after every class (getting pancakes at Cedar's, the Lebanese Restaurant on the Ave, has become a peculiar tradition for us) and hang out on the weekends. It's pretty incredible how well our personalities all jive together. We all complement each other in various ways, and whenever we get together it's just a riot of a good time. The best part of this is that this happens by us just being around each other. The first night we had an official "Honors Crew" hang out was supposed to be a movie night, but we didn't end up watching a movie at all. Instead, we spent hours upon hours just talking, telling stories, and having discussions and debates about issues ranging from serious to silly. I am most grateful to this program for bringing all of us together, and I'm just sad that we didn't all meet sooner. I am actually excited for Winter Quarter to start so that we can all be together again and embark on our next literary quest as a cohort of friends.
Honors Seminar: ENGL 494 B
Coming of Age stories are among the staples of popular fiction and undoubtedly you’ve read many such stories long before you began to study literature at the university. You might have read The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird in high school, or you became entranced with the Harry Potter novels, (and the films made from them), but you might not have been aware that these books were representatives of an important literary genre: the bildungsroman (a German term for fiction that focuses on the developmental process: the growth of an individual from youth to adulthood.) The bildungsroman has a long history, beginning in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century with Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. The genre became immensely popular and spread rapidly to other countries, including Britain. This class will consider how some of the major writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in England and Ireland transformed the bildungsroman and used it to investigate a wide range of issues, such as industrialization, nationalism, feminism, sexuality, and the role of the artist in modern society. We also will investigate how the genre became a vehicle for formal experimentation.
The reading will include novels by Charlotte Bronte, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Jeannette Winterson.
The reading will include novels by Charlotte Bronte, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Jeannette Winterson.
Of course, Honors Seminar was much more than just making friends. Professor Kaplan made it as rigorous as one might expect, having us relentlessly read five fairly dense books throughout the quarter. I've never read so much in such a short period of time, with even fewer days devoted to discussion than in any other class I've taken, and yet I felt like we discussed much more in those few days than we would have in those non-Honors classes.
The biggest challenge, however, was the term paper. Our only written assignment (aside from the discussions questions we had to write for each class), Professor Kaplan simply told us that it had to be 10-20 pages in length. On the first day of class she told us that in order to do any subject justice, we should know what we would be writing by the third week of the quarter and then start writing half way into the quarter to allow enough time. Naturally, this freaked me out, but a topic came to me with little trouble and after a discussion with Professor Kaplan, I was ready to begin researching and writing.
The term paper was unlike anything I'd written before, and so the experience of writing it is more meaningful to me than any grade I might have gotten on it. I'd never written anything of such length for an English class, and so I was unsure how to proceed. 10-20 pages allows much more freedom, and Professor Kaplan advised that I utilize it. She counseled that I not be so beholden to structures that I had had become used to in literary analysis before. Also, since she provided no prompts, I would have the liberty to approach the topic however I saw fit. However, all this freedom made me feel a little unfocused, and the greatest challenge of this term paper was grappling with a sense of aimlessness. I had a topic of interest, but I wasn't sure how to flesh it out. I could point to instances in the novel where it appeared, but how could I extend that beyond to mean something more? This proved a problem in researching as well, as I wasn't sure what I should incorporate and how it would serve me. At times, it felt like I was including research and secondary sources simply for the sake of doing so, to create length or to make my paper match this lofty image of "term paper". I think at a certain point, I lost sight of what was important, which was my topic, and it became about living up to the expectations of being in the Seminar class. This became pretty evident when I gave my Oral Report to the class about what I had been writing, and while it started off super focused and making sense, it soon devolved into me grappling with terms and ideas that didn't clearly flesh out the point I was trying to make. So I spent the days before the paper was due furiously figuring out again what I was trying to say. It was a frustrating time in my life, since I would spend hours and hours each day and have very little to show in all that time. But after battling it out in this way, revelation finally struck and I think I was able to revise it in a way that discarded all the extraneous material I was trying to stuff in there to sound academic and instead focused on what was important.
Having to write this paper was great practice for me to get out of my comfort zone, but also in teaching me to not try to do too much, or do things for the sake of doing them. Professor Kaplan had designed this assignment as practice for the thesis I'm going to have to write in the Spring, and I am grateful to her for doing so. Now that I have an idea of what to expect, I feel like I'll be able to approach my thesis with integrity.
The biggest challenge, however, was the term paper. Our only written assignment (aside from the discussions questions we had to write for each class), Professor Kaplan simply told us that it had to be 10-20 pages in length. On the first day of class she told us that in order to do any subject justice, we should know what we would be writing by the third week of the quarter and then start writing half way into the quarter to allow enough time. Naturally, this freaked me out, but a topic came to me with little trouble and after a discussion with Professor Kaplan, I was ready to begin researching and writing.
The term paper was unlike anything I'd written before, and so the experience of writing it is more meaningful to me than any grade I might have gotten on it. I'd never written anything of such length for an English class, and so I was unsure how to proceed. 10-20 pages allows much more freedom, and Professor Kaplan advised that I utilize it. She counseled that I not be so beholden to structures that I had had become used to in literary analysis before. Also, since she provided no prompts, I would have the liberty to approach the topic however I saw fit. However, all this freedom made me feel a little unfocused, and the greatest challenge of this term paper was grappling with a sense of aimlessness. I had a topic of interest, but I wasn't sure how to flesh it out. I could point to instances in the novel where it appeared, but how could I extend that beyond to mean something more? This proved a problem in researching as well, as I wasn't sure what I should incorporate and how it would serve me. At times, it felt like I was including research and secondary sources simply for the sake of doing so, to create length or to make my paper match this lofty image of "term paper". I think at a certain point, I lost sight of what was important, which was my topic, and it became about living up to the expectations of being in the Seminar class. This became pretty evident when I gave my Oral Report to the class about what I had been writing, and while it started off super focused and making sense, it soon devolved into me grappling with terms and ideas that didn't clearly flesh out the point I was trying to make. So I spent the days before the paper was due furiously figuring out again what I was trying to say. It was a frustrating time in my life, since I would spend hours and hours each day and have very little to show in all that time. But after battling it out in this way, revelation finally struck and I think I was able to revise it in a way that discarded all the extraneous material I was trying to stuff in there to sound academic and instead focused on what was important.
Having to write this paper was great practice for me to get out of my comfort zone, but also in teaching me to not try to do too much, or do things for the sake of doing them. Professor Kaplan had designed this assignment as practice for the thesis I'm going to have to write in the Spring, and I am grateful to her for doing so. Now that I have an idea of what to expect, I feel like I'll be able to approach my thesis with integrity.