Senior Project in Literature

As the capstone to your Literature major, you will embark upon a senior project in the fall of your senior year, a student-driven twenty-five page paper on a subject that you have always wanted to explore but have never had the time for. Follow your passion!

The Department awards an annual prize to the best Senior Project or Honors Thesis. To give you an idea of the many possibilities, previous students have chosen to write on:

• Hamlet and Batman
• Metaphors in Mathematics
• Hookworms and Literature: A Study of Representations of Parasites in Literature
• Identity and Form in Maxine Hong Kingston and Julia Alvarez
• Allegory and Christian Literature: The Work of C.S. Lewis and Madeline L'Engle
• Postmodern Identity in the Poetry of Rae Armantrout
• Delusion in Jane Austen
• Adaptations: Comparing the Novel and Film Version of Trainspotting
• Diasporic Identity in Jhumpa Lahiri and Bharati Mukherjee
• Re-creation in Virgil and Garcia Marquez
• Silence in Wideman and Morrison
• Double Consciousness in Morrison and Lessing
• Surrealism and its Relation to Realism in Breton and Magritte
• Male Code Heroes in Hemingway, London, and Contemporary Surf Literature
• All Female Communities in Christine de Pisan and Gilman
• West-African Poetry and its Relation to African-American Poetry
• Medieval Fabliaux and the Problem of Legitimation
• A Collection of Short Stories Undermining the Notion of Poetic Justice

Versions of our majors' senior projects have been accepted at national conferences (AU paid the airfare so the student could attend), have won prizes at AU's Ann Robyn Mathias Student Research Conference, have won CAS Dean's Awards for further research ($3,000) to enable them to spend the summer refining the project for possible publication, and have won both prizes and honorable mentions in the University Honors Program best capstone competition. The best projects originate from a student's passionate desire to figure something out, and these projects never quite end up where they were expected to. Students hone their writing and thinking skills; they share the process of developing their intellectual passions and discoveries as they become part of a senior cohort.