Honors Seminars

Only open to students in the Humanities and Sciences Honors Program. These two seminars will satisfy the H&S general-education requirement for a Level 1 writing course.

307-11500-01 INTO THE WILD 3a h g
(Honors Seminar, James Swafford, Department of English)

In this seminar, students will investigate both "wildness" (the experience) and "wilderness" (the place) and the temptation they offer and the fear they inspire. To what extent is a journey into the physical wilderness also a journey into unfamiliar realms of the psyche? What is the relationship between our ideas and representations of the wild and the actualities of it? What of wildness can be conveyed through art, such as landscape painting? On the literary side, we'll explore these issues in such works as Euripides' play The Bakkhai, Shelley's Frankenstein, Silko's Ceremony, Burgess?s A Clockwork Orange, and poetry by Blake, Coleridge, and Lawrence.

377-16200-01 FACING NATURE, WITHOUT AND WITHIN 3a h
(Honors Seminar, Catherine Penner, Department of Writing)

We will begin the course with Nick Jans' book Grizzly Maze and the film Grizzly Man, both of which present perspectives on Timothy Treadwell's many summers among the bears of the Alaskan coast. We will then read works of such naturalists as Wendell Berry and Scott Russell Sanders, as well as Ceremony, native-American Leslie Marmon Silko's novel about the torturous return of a young, WWII-scarred soldier to his native landscape. We will discuss the sometimes complementary, sometimes competing views these writers offer of both the wilds of nature and the wilderness within ourselves and of what they see as ideal relationships of humans to the potentially threatening and/or comforting, imperiled natural world. Our readings and discussions will Culminate in essays of personal discovery, of analysis, of argument.