{"id":1043,"date":"2018-04-04T22:30:11","date_gmt":"2018-04-04T22:30:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/160-the-words\/?page_id=1043"},"modified":"2024-08-06T17:39:43","modified_gmt":"2024-08-06T17:39:43","slug":"honors-projects","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/the-words-april-2018\/honors-projects\/","title":{"rendered":"Honors Projects"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alex Harrington \u201919<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"HONORS<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As the school year heads to a close, seven senior English majors look forward to their Honors Projects defenses, the culmination of a year\u2019s work. <\/span>The Honors Project<\/span><\/a> is a yearlong, intensive alternative to a Capstone. Like the Capstone, Honors Projects can be an extensive work of literary criticism or creative writing. In case you\u2019re interested in the Honors experience, <\/span>The Words<\/span><\/i> has the inside scoop on this year\u2019s Honors Projects. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Words<\/span><\/i>\u2019s own Zeena Fuleihan, a Creative Writing Major with minors in Music and Classical Mediterranean and Middle East Languages, is writing a literary fiction novel in three sections. Each section focuses \u201con a young woman who has some sort of ruptured relationship of home to Beirut, Lebanon in different time periods, from 1948 until 2012.\u201d Further, the novel deals with \u201cinternal conflicts related to their identities as female, young, and in places of liminal home.\u201d Fuleihan says she had always wanted to write about the themes covered in her work, and was inspired to follow through after writing a piece for Professor Marlon James\u2019s Crafts of Fiction class. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ally Moore is a Creative Writing Major with minors in Biology and Hispanic Studies. She is writing a \u201cyoung adult novel about five juniors at an alternative boarding school in middle-of-nowhere, Vermont.\u201d The narrators are \u201cthe new girl who chose the school over military academy and the boy who started mysteriously sleepwalking his first year there.\u201d She adds that there is \u201cmagic,\u201d \u201ccreepy greyhounds,\u201d \u201cunexplainable sleepwalking,\u201d and \u201cgirls who street race.\u201d Moore\u2019s goal is eventually \u201cto be a novelist with no day job,\u201d so the Honors Project began with choosing which of her many project ideas to work on. She intends the chosen idea to be the first in a series, and she wanted to give herself the opportunity to fully set the stage for its intended successors.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

John Ratz is a Creative Writing Major and Sociology Minor. His project is \u201cabout post-apocalyptic werewolves with fluid gender and sexuality.\u201d The protagonist \u201cis exiled from his community and turned into a werewolf, and must choose between joining the pack he falls in with or protecting people he’s known all of his life.\u201d Ratz\u2019s work centers on \u201cwerewolves whose biology is less stable than in traditional depictions,\u201d explores \u201cwhat the implications of these challenges are for communities clinging to survival,\u201d and also has \u201cpulse-pounding action.\u201d Of the project\u2019s origins, Ratz says the idea began as a short story written for class his first year and has been \u201clurking in the back of [his] mind since.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leon Swerdel-Rich is majoring in Classics and Creative Writing. He is \u201cwriting a science fiction screenplay about the purpose of dreams.\u201d Set in a distant future where humans have harnessed \u201ca marvelous energy they could only call the stuff of dreams,\u201d people called dreamers \u201cinherit dreams\u201d and \u201cwork wonders.\u201d The plot follows a storyteller who must fight off nightmares to \u201csave humanity\u2019s dreamers.\u201d Swerdel-Rich has \u201calways been fascinated by visual storytelling,\u201d and became interested in experimenting with the medium \u201cwhen writing screenplays in Peter Bognanni\u2019s Literary Adaptation and Matthew Burgess\u2019s Mystery Narratives courses.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Spencer Fugate is a Literature and Classical Languages Double Major. She\u2019s writing a project about \u201cSyphilis and Sisyphus (or Classical Allusions) in Samuel Taylor Coleridge and E.A. Robinson.\u201d Fugate chose the project because she \u201cwas charmed by the notion of attempting innovative readings of two eccentric figures in radically different social, political and economic environments.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Libby Eggert, a Literature and American Studies Double Major with a minor in History, is \u201clooking at whether the nature of war writing has changed as war has changed.\u201d Her project focuses on Vietnam War and Iraq War fiction by American authors, and looks specifically at binaries in war. Eggert\u2019s project began initially as an interest in unreliable narration; she knew she wanted to use Tim O\u2019Brien\u2019s <\/span>The Things They Carried<\/span><\/i>, and her project evolved from there.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Liza Michaeli is a Literature Major and a Critical Theory Concentrator. Her project asks, \u201cwhat is at stake in writing about the unsayable? How does suffering take place in language when the unsayable is submitted to analysis? What, if analysis fails\u2026 is an appropriate response to (the arrival of) the unsayable?\u201d From the \u201ccrossroads of postmodern poetry and philosophy,\u201d she is writing about \u201cthe exorbitant compromise involved in writing.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The limits for what an Honors Project can be are sky high. Leon Swerdel-Rich says that \u201c\u2018lostness\u2019 is the aspect of writing\u201d he\u2019s been able to learn exclusively from his Honors experience. The consensus is that if you are haunted by an idea for a long term project and want to work closely with a professor to see it borne, an Honors Project might be for you. Honors defense presentations are currently underway, so look out for information about public presentations in the department. From all of us at <\/span>The Words<\/span><\/i>, good luck!<\/span><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alex Harrington \u201919 As the school year heads to a close, seven senior English majors look forward to their Honors Projects defenses, the culmination of a year\u2019s work. The Honors Project is a yearlong, intensive alternative to a Capstone. Like the Capstone, Honors Projects can be an extensive work of literary criticism or creative writing. […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":913,"featured_media":0,"parent":1039,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1043","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/913"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1043"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1043\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7683,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1043\/revisions\/7683"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}