Comps Insider: The English Colloquium

For this Comps Insider installment, I sat down with Elena Cebulash, Diana Kachman, Riley Madsen, Brodie Mutschler, Hannah Piper, Kota Shibui and Andriana Taratsas, all senior English majors. The group meets weekly as part of their work on the 2023 Colloquium, a comps option unique in its exclusivity to the English major and its collaborative nature. Arriving at a meeting earlier this term, I found the group already embroiled in a fierce discussion that started about the meat industry but quickly expanded to include American culture as a whole. 

Before we tackle that main course, however, we’ll begin with some appetizing background information.

BEN MORE: Starting off more broadly, what attracted you to the English major in the first place, and what about the department do you enjoy?

HANNAH PIPER: Coming to Carleton, I was planning on pursuing a biology major, but then COVID-19 hit pretty early, and I had a really hard time enjoying those classes online. I was really loving my English classes, though, as those translated very well over Zoom, and I found myself taking more and more of them. And then I guess one thing led to another, and now I’m an English major! Oh, and Pierre [Hecker, associate professor of English] also suckered me into the MARS [Medieval and Renaissance Studies] minor.

ELENA CEBULASH: I also didn’t come in as a prospective English major, which is kind of stupid, because it has always been my favorite class—always. I was actually going to be a bio major, too, or maybe ENTS [environmental studies], but I also started really loving my English classes. I was grappling with the fact that I thought I should do some STEM, career-driven thing, and I had this major crisis where I just wanted to keep on taking English classes and wanted to keep on reading and writing and talking, and I eventually just decided to stand up for that. It’s been great!

BM: Tell me a little bit about the Colloquium option for English comps. What’s the end goal of your meetings and what are they typically like?

ANDRIANA TARATSAS: Colloquium is basically a way to take what you’ve done with the English major so far, in terms of discussion-based classes and learning how to talk about literature, and do it on your own with a professor-curated list of books that we edited. The goal is to learn to spot threads across different kinds of literature from different time periods by different writers.

We’re studying American literature from the 1800s [while also] talking about more contemporary literature. We’ve read [Margaret Atwood’s] “The Handmaid’s Tale.” We’ve also read [Ruth Ozeki’s] “My Year of Meats.” So in each meeting now, we’re trying to wrap our heads around what the books are about and how they might relate to other things we’ve done so far.

BM: So you’re discussing a professor-curated list of books surrounding a certain topic?

EC: Well, all the classes we take [in the English department] have a professor-designed list of books, but [Colloquium comps] elevates us past that, past even our senior seminar, [in that] it’s not just taking a list of books from a professor and running with that in a class. We designed our own syllabus based off [this list], recommended additions to and cuts from it, wrote our own proposal and our own class, and now we’re running it.

We act as the professor and the student in a really interesting way, like it’s the next level beyond what we’d do in regular classes. [Colloquium comps] requires you to debate, to close read, to listen, and to do everything you do in every other English class. It’s kind of like the Olympics of the English major! It also happens really quickly and all at once. It’s not spread over a long period of time like a research paper might be. You’re given [the topic] and you’ve got to do the work quickly, showcasing all of what you’ve learned over the years, and then you’ve got to turn around and produce really valuable insights from it.

AT: Exactly. I’ll also add that, whereas most English classes are centered around specific time periods or authors, like Gothic Literature or Jane Austen, this topic is much broader. We’re covering a wide array of books, so there’s an added challenge of figuring out what the connecting pieces are as we go, when that’s usually obvious starting from the first day in a typical class.

BM: Once the Colloquium meetings are over, what is the end product going to look like?

Riley Madsen: [We have to write] 5,000 words each.

EC: It’ll be around 20 pages of written work per person, about topics that we individually design and choose based on the books we’ve been reading. We can also split the work however we want.

HP: Yes, we can write several different essays, as long as it adds up to those 20 pages.

EC: So we work together to peer edit, discuss and run the class, but our comps projects that we’ll present on are individual papers.

BM: Was this group randomly assigned? How did you start working together?

HP: We’re the only [senior English majors] who chose this comps option, so we’re automatically in a group together.

BM: When I got here, there was a lot of talk about meat in ways that did not make me hungry. What were you discussing today?

EC: “My Year of Meats” by Ruth Ozeki. In a general sense, what we do as English majors when talking about a book is: we each read and think about the book on our own, then we come together and discuss our ideas with one another. We overview the entire book and its themes, but we also go in depth to create parallels between different pieces within the book as well as with other works. A cannibalism of the mind, if you will. That’s [what we were doing] today.

AT: “My Year of Meats” is an early novel by Ozeki about a pretty niche topic.

HP: It’s an absurdist sort of comedy.

AT: Exactly. There are multiple storylines, but it’s predominantly about two characters: a Japanese-American woman named Jane and a Japanese woman named Akiko. Jane is trying to film a television show for Japanese audiences called “My American Wife,” which has an American and Japanese crew going around the U.S. searching for these “perfect” American wives and mothers [and their] trademark meat recipes. The goal is to film them making their signature meat recipe so that [Jane] can then promote the meat industry to Japanese audiences. The book explores topics about life—like the lives of humans versus the lives of animals. So we were talking about reproduction today, which is a really big piece of the novel. We were also talking about dynamics in terms of gender and race and cross-cultural interactions—all of those are big parts of the book as well. 

BM: Is there a general topic that your readings revolve around, or are you finding that out as you go?

EC: Our topic this year is titled “Off the Page.”

HP: For our proposal, the “Off the Page” prompt required us to compile a list of literature that involves social change, which is, helpfully, an umbrella that includes most books you could think of. Our goal is to find different threads and themes within that broader topic, connect these stories and have fun with it!

EC: Kofi [Owusu, Marjorie Crabb Garbisch professor of the liberal arts and professor of English] always says to “find a way of mapping out the novel and rearrange it to make it make sense for you.” I once interrogated him on that, because I had no idea if he wanted us to actually rearrange the books’ chapters or something like that, and he was like, “This is just my way of saying ‘write about whatever you want.’” 

I usually [describe this topic as] “literature as activism.” That’s my way of thinking about it, [that this] literature is in communication with social change and creates social change. [This is] literature that makes its way into the veins of society—again with the meat references!—and becomes referenced within other conversations.

BM: Finally, what has been your favorite part of Colloquium so far?

Kota Shibui: I like that it’s very informal, like the lunch meetings and film screenings we’ve done.

Diana Kachman: I really like the diversity of the authors and work, especially as we discover common themes that can tie very different works together.

After drafting and peer-reviewing their individual essays this term, Cebulash, Kachman, Madsen, Mutschler, Piper, Shibui and Taratsas will present their findings as a group next term alongside other English majors at the department’s annual Comps Symposium.