Senior Seminar

ENGL 496: What You Should Have Read
Fall 2025
Professor Chloe Wheatley

ENGL 496: Literary Creativity
Spring 2026
Professor Sarah Bilston

ENGL 496: What You Should Have Read

This is your final year as an English major. There are books and authors, that, once upon a time, you thought every English major should have read. You still haven’t. One of this seminar’s purposes is to let you to do so. One of its other purposes is to ask and answer the question: Why? Why did you think that every English major should have read this book? Why hadn’t you? Why has or hasn’t the text met your great expectations? We will also be discussing related issues such as canonicity and canon changes, the structure of the English major, and the reasons why you chose it. The students will generate (and debate) the reading list and syllabus. The instructor will generate the requirements.

ENGL 496: Literary Creativity

What is creativity? This capstone invites students to reflect on what they’ve learned about literary innovation as English majors and then consider how to deploy their insights after college. Which writers seem, to you, particularly creative? What makes a work, an artist, an era, creative? Are there particular character traits or circumstances that inspire creativity or can anyone, at any time, be creative? What’s the relationship between creativity and innovation; creativity and tradition; creativity and resistance? Reading a series of secondary works alongside primary texts (by, for instance, William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, William Wordsworth, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, and Jericho Brown), we’ll debate these issues in class and in written work (analytic essays and “creative writing”). Trying out new forms, experimenting with structures, our final project will be a manifesto on creativity, a personal guide for each student to use as they work after Trinity to lead reflective, creative, generative lives.