Spring—frost recedes, sunsets stretch, baby birkenstocks take tentative first steps into a brave new world. And all over campus echoes the sound of hundreds of students breathing a single sigh of relief—comps is over.
Tomorrow from 9 am to 1 pm, senior English majors take the floor on Second Laird to present their comps. Because comps talks can be downright arcane to people outside the major (and many within it), we asked the seniors to write a brief summary of their comps in English as simple as possible, and hereby present you with a highly paraphrased version of the agenda. These are just a few sneak previews of tomorrow’s excitement, and we hope to see you there! Way to go, Class of 2018!
RESEARCH
Joseph Brommel
Pale Fire is really good and you should read it (and don’t overthink it when you do).
Hannah Gellman
Shakespeare wrote three important plays with brothers and sisters. The brothers sometimes help the sisters, but sometimes they try to stop the sisters from making their own choices. Sisters who find freedom from their brothers do a good job at balancing what they want with what their family wants. When Shakespeare writes about sisters like this, he shows that women’s experiences are important.
CREATIVE
Paco Alvarez
The Immigrant Problem is a group of poems about how the history of Argentina, my family’s history, and my life are all connected.
COLLOQUIUM
Grace Johnson
One of the essays that I’m going to talk about deals with contradictory conceptions of the private sphere and its relation to transcendence in E.M. Forster’s Howards End and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty.
Natty Maneerit
One of my comps is on Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” and Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art”. Here’s my thesis: Comparing these evolvements in their respective poems, Bishop, through a more tentative approach, shows the infeasibility of repressed nature as expected of women while Plath explosively demonizes oppressive entities and necessitates their obliteration. (Essentially, it’s about how each female writer found a way to show resistance through their work in a male-dominated literary sphere. In consonance with their disparate personalities, Bishop took a more tentative approach while Plath’s poem is much more explosive.)
The other comps is on Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and J.M. Coetzee’s Foe. Here’s the thesis: While DeFoe exercises full authorial authority to privilege the dominant culture in Robinson Crusoe, Coetzee revises and unsettles it in Foe to show the repressive nature of a master narrative.
Mary Savoye
There was an island… or something… I can’t remember everything… I wonder why that is…? — I was writing about Robinson Crusoe and two other texts from our colloquium list and how the memory of the island experience was captured differently according to the different genres the texts were re-written in.
and
Someone died and I was sad. And when I leaned my head against a wall I somehow felt better. — I was exploring the way that three different texts on our colloquium list incorporated physical structures alongside their characters’ experiences of personal grief.
Adriana Smith
What is said directly could be better said indirectly, and academia can sometimes be a dangerous damper to love and joy.
PROJECT
Martha Durrett
How does a digital literary project work, and how can data and algorithms enrich our understanding of and interaction with a text? This comps explores the answers to these questions through graphs and data collected from the works of Charles Dickens and demonstrates some of the exciting, original insights that lie in the intersection between English and computer science.