Author: Caroline Osborn
The English and Comparative Literary Studies Comps process has undergone a makeover. In previous years, professors charged graduating seniors with the mastery of seven texts that spanned historical eras, represented a variety of different cultures, and included multiple genres. Students studied these in preparation for an essay exam at the end of January, which lasted six to eight hours. The first alteration to this system occurred three or four years ago. Under the newer plan, students worked with these same texts, but wrote shorter essays throughout the semester in their Senior Seminar classes.
“It was very prescriptive and led in many cases to some fairly mechanical preparation,” said Professor John Swift, the chair of the ECLS department.
This year the faculty crafted a new system in which students wrote one extended critical analysis piece and presented it in a symposium modeled after actual literary conferences.
Swift was pleased with this new organization.
“It allows our majors to work at what they’re passionate about, and that seems to produce some pretty good results,” Swift said. “It very forcefully changes the typical classroom dynamics of authority, and it brings us together as a scholarly community whose members teach one another.”
The ECLS department plans on continuing to use the symposium format for senior comps, with some slight changes. Students are obviously flourishing within the new research structure. Some of them presented at the Southern California Conference for Undergraduate Research, and a few are planning on presenting at the National Conference for Undergraduate Research.
Last week, Oxy’s twenty-seven ECLS majors presented fifteen-minute speeches detailing the essence of their senior composition projects to a group of proud friends, family, and evaluating professors. The orations encapsulated the arguments they presented in their extended senior comps essays. Divided between Thursday and Friday of last week, each student offered an in-depth analysis of an individual literary piece, concentrating on a very specific aspect of the work.
Ashley Pond, for example, delivered an engaging interpretation of Toni Morrison’s novel, Song of Solomon, asserting that the male protagonist, Milkman, facilitates meaningful interaction between female characters in the story. She attributes Morrison’s choice of a male lead character to gender-inclusionary tactics that weaken tension between racism and sexism, which has the potential to further divide black men and women. When no longer forced to choose a side, an oppressed group can work together in order to approach its opponent with a more united front. After her presentation, Professor Newhall commended her on an insightful reading of the text.
Emery Desper illuminated the relationship between race and sexual desire in Dutchman, the play by Amiri Baraka. By analyzing this complex topic philosophically and religiously Desper clearly demonstrated the perceptive thought she had put into her project. A row full of enthusiastic friends slid into their seats just in time to see her presentation, and cheered loudly at its conclusion.
Gabe Moseley approached the microphone with his paper in one hand and a water bottle in the other to speak about his ideas concerning Captain Ahab in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. He addressed Ahab’s broken body, its relation to the conflict between physical and spiritual, and the character’s struggle against the forces of nature. Moseley’s speech clearly stirred renewed interest in a classic novel.
Daniel Minguez’s presentation, titled “Cat’s Cradle: The Apocalypse of Human Thought,” both lightened and darkened the mood in a discussion of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. He tackled the paradox introduced by this text’s intention to break the reader’s reliance on texts.
The audience laughed at comic quotes he selected from the novel, and nodded in approval as he elucidated their deeper meanings, discussing nihilism, science, and religion.
The students’ nervousness was palpable, but so was their sense of accomplishment. Many of them carried a dignified, purposeful air to the lectern, and left it with the tingling of relieved elation one feels after successfully completing a task that had once seemed insurmountable. These students will graduate within two short months and apply their considerable talents to their future careers.
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