ENGL 396

Spring 2026 All Classes

All Classes

English Honors Seminar

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Credit: 3 hours.

An open-topic, discussion-oriented seminar aimed at majors who have shown high skill and intensive interest in the area of English studies.

May be repeated up to 6 hours in the same term to a maximum of 12 hours. Prerequisite: A 3.33 grade point average or consent of the English Department's Director of Undergraduate Studies. Restricted to English majors.

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ENGL 396 class schedule data for spring 2026
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	32113	Lecture-Discussion	D	12:00PM -12:50PM	MWF	135 English Building	McNulty, T	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/20/26-05/06/26 Special Approval: Departmental Approval Required Section Info: SP26 ENGL 396 - English Honors Seminar - Tess McNulty - Fiction and Therapy - We are living in the era of therapy. Since the turn of the twentieth century when Freud theorized the “talking cure,” to the present day, when every blogger and TikTok-er implores us to “do the work,” psychotherapy, and the ideas that surround it, have inundated our culture and our lives. Meanwhile, multiple works of literature and art—from novels by Virginia Woolf and Philip Roth, to poems and comics by Claudia Rankine and Alison Bechdel, to TV shows and podcasts like the Sopranos and Couples Therapy—have responded to, and depicted, therapeutic ideas and practices. In this course, we’ll survey the post-1900 history of therapeutic thought and practice through the lens of this body of multi-media fictional work, exploring not only how fiction has engaged with all things therapeutic, but also how fiction is—or has aspired to be—its own type of therapy. This honors course will also focus, particularly, on helping students hone the skill of writing literary and art-critical essays. Through hands on lessons, we’ll walk through every step of the process, from close reading, researching, and outlining, to crafting and structuring compelling arguments. Restriction(s): Restricted to Undergrad - Urbana-Champaign.
	32114	Lecture-Discussion	X	2:00PM -3:15PM	TR	123 English Building	Pollock, A	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/20/26-05/06/26 Special Approval: Departmental Approval Required Section Info: SP26 ENGL 396 English Honors Seminar - Anthony Pollock - Literature and Empire in the “Age of Enlightenment” (ca. 1688-1789) - This seminar will examine the complex, multidirectional relationships between popular literary forms and the practices of empire in the historical period conventionally referred to in European history as “The Enlightenment.” On the one hand, the years 1688 and 1789 are associated with watershed moments of political revolution in England and France, whose absolutist monarchs (James II and Louis XVI) were deposed in the name of ostensibly universal principles like freedom and inalienable rights; on the other hand, these dates also mark the publication of two influential texts—Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative—which present readers with often graphic representations of both the violent imposition of Anglo-European colonial-imperial power in the Americas and West Africa and the concerted resistance to that power by these texts’ non-European protagonists and their allies. One task of this seminar will be to understand more precisely the terms of this counterintuitive simultaneity: how are we to make sense of the literary and historical co-presence of emergent Anglo-European discourses of political liberation (domestically) with the rapid expansion of Anglo-European technologies of empire (on a global scale)? We will approach this question through several analytical focus points in the primary materials: their representations of ethnography and intercultural contact zones, their promulgation and/or interrogation of orientalist ideologies and colonialist apologetics, their depictions of slavery and the plantation system, and the ecological consequences of empire on the more-than-human world, among other topics. Readings may include texts by Aphra Behn, Ottobah Cugoano, Daniel Defoe, Olaudah Equiano, Samuel Johnson, Mary Wortley Montagu, Michel de Montaigne, Jonathan Swift, and Voltaire. Restriction(s): Restricted to Undergrad - Urbana-Champaign.