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junior year:
During my junior year of college, I took one honors course and three upper-level courses. Here's a little bit of information on them and the kind of coursework required of us.
single author: Eudora Welty
This was the first upper-level course I took at Drury. This class was a literature class focused on one specific author: Eudora Welty. Welty was an American author who wrote and published the majority of her works in the mid-1900s. She primarily wrote short stories but also published a few novels. Our final project in this class was extremely wide ranged. There were some students who chose to write a literary analysis and a few (including me) who chose to write a short story mirroring some of the themes Welty touched on. To the right is the short story I chose to submit for our final project. Much like what Welty wrote about, this story touches on pregnancy and the loss of life.
theory and practice
This class was a doozy, and unlike any I have ever taken. We were required to read a handful of classic novels, novellas, and critical theorists. Specifically, we read The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. After we finished reading each of these works, we compared them to theorists such as Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Michel Foucault. To the left is my comparison between The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and the Foucauldian theory.
Nature of the English language
This class is not all that I expected it to be. Initially, I thought that we would be learning about where English as a language came from and how it evolved from Old English to what is now Modern English. While we did read and discuss these things, we also learned about different linguists and their beliefs on how language came to be in the first place. We questioned alongside some of these linguists whether or not language shapes thought or if thought shapes language. We also learned about different types of Modern English and what it means to code-switch between them. To the right, I've attached my rendition of what I believed to be the most fun assignment of the semester. We were required to write a (non-formal) blog post including some of the things we learned from a specific unit. I wrote about the differences between British English and American English, as well as what it took for the Bible to be translated into English.
First-year honors-
social justice
This is the only honors course I took my junior year of college. It's one of those classes I took because it was required, but also one I learned more from than I thought I would. Over the course of the semester, we read Paradise by Toni Morrison, a collection of speeches from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., The Idea of Justice by Amartya Sen, Predisposed by John R. Alford, John R. Hibbing, and Kevin B. Smith, as well as Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. From these works, we learned about different theories of justice, and what it means to be a social activist. I learned a lot about my country and about myself in this class. Politics are something I try to steer clear from; however, this class put difficult topics right in front of me, and I liked being forced to think about them. I think this course has made me a better person. One of the assignments in this class was to interview someone in our family or a friend outside of school and talk to them about the material that we had been reading in class. I chose to interview my cousin, and to the right, you can read my findings.
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