4th Year Honours Seminars Handbook

Seminars Are Not Lecture Courses

Honours seminars differ from the lecture courses you are used to in three primary ways: size, subject and format. First, honours seminars are small, capped at 16 students. It is expected that every student in a seminar will be an engaged and active participant. Honours seminars are designed for intense study; the small class size ensures not only that every student has an opportunity to participate but also that every student has an obligation to participate. Second, unlike the rather wide-ranging period and genre surveys you have experienced, honours seminars pursue a specific and focused topic of study.

Often the seminar is organized around a principal critical question. Here are some examples of the kinds of questions recently offered seminars have examined: In what ways did the nineteenth-century novel engage with the radical politics of its day? How did Restoration plays stage masculinity? What is the Canadian historical novel? Why were Victorian writers and artists fascinated by the archetype of the Fallen Woman? To what extent do recent hypertexts demand a mode of reading different from traditional print texts?

Sometimes the seminar is organized around the work of a single author. Recent seminars have focused on the works of Timothy Findley, Christopher Marlowe, J.M Coetzee, and J.K. Rowling.

Whether the seminar is organized around a single author or a principal critical question, the required reading for the course will almost always include both primary literary texts and secondary critical texts. Students are required to gain knowledge of the various ways in which other scholars have approached the topic or question at hand.

Finally, seminars are distinguished from the lecture courses you are familiar with by the fact that the content of classes is largely student-generated. Your professor may lecture occasionally, particularly at the start of the course, and she or he will likely give you specific questions to consider while you’re reading. Primarily though, your professor will act as a facilitator, guiding the discussion that you and your peers produce yourselves. Your professor is not there to do the work of the seminar for you. In most cases, as the seminar progresses, individual students will be asked to take charge of a specific class for anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. (Don’t panic. This doesn’t happen spontaneously; you will sign up for a specific class and topic.) What you must thoroughly understand, though, is that the seminar is a collaborative enquirers, researching and writing together, and mutually benefiting from the good, solid work of each other. You will rely on your classmates, and they will be relying on you.

Some Frequently Asked Questions

Why do we have to take these seminars?

Completion of an honours seminar is the primary distinction between an honours-level degree and a general degree. Students who successfully complete honours seminars will have demonstrated that they can write and speak clearly, coherently, and at length about complex, critical ideas. Honours seminars also offer students a concentrated opportunity to develop and refine their own critical voices and to demonstrate the extent to which they can apply the knowledge and skills they have acquired in the previous three years. An ability to complete honours seminars is an integral part of the “honours” in an honours degree.

It sounds like honours seminars are hard. Is that true?

If by “hard” you mean “intellectually challenging,” then yes, that’s true. But that challenge is also what makes the seminars rewarding.

Do seminars require more work than other courses?

Yes, you will likely find that the seminars require a lot of work.

I’m not that interested in what my fellow students have to say. Why do I have to waste my time listening to them when the professor could just tell me what’s important?

Scholarship is collaborative. Knowledge is the product of a conversation, and it’s the product of a conversation that has been going on for a long, long time. Scholars build upon, refine, question or reconsider what other scholars have said before themand they interest themselves in what others are saying right now. To a greater degree than lecture courses, honours seminars offer an opportunity to engage in scholarly conversation. This conversation increases in value to the extent that it includes a diversity of voices and to the extent that ideas can meet with an immediate and active response or challenge. If you are genuinely not interested in this conversation, then you may wish to reconsider your desire to complete an honours degree.

In more practical terms, honours seminars are designed to assess whether students are able to identify “what’s important” or still require the professor to tell them.

Are these research courses?

Yes. Students are expected to conduct a significant amount of scholarly research for each paper they write and each presentation they give. As a point of information, Google searches and Wikipedia do not count as scholarly research.

There seems to be a lot of emphasis on participation in the seminars. What if I’m shy and don’t like to speak in front of others?

Yes, honours seminars do place a lot of emphasis on participation, and that emphasis generally translates into a fairly heft percentage of your grade. Preparation and participation can account for 15% to 25% of your final grade. You’re going to have to confront the fact of speaking in front of others if you wish to succeed in the seminars. There is no magic answer to this problem, but here are some things to keep in mind: first, EVERYONE feels anxious about expressing his or her ideas in front of others. Being nervous about how others may respond to your ideas is a perfectly ordinary human feeling; anxiety is normal. If you’re waiting for it to go away, you’ll be waiting forever. “I’d speak if only I didn’t feel anxious,” then, is not a viable position because that situation will never come about. Second, remember that, whatever you choose to do after graduation, it will most likely include having to express some ideas in front of other people. Choose now to use these seminars as a place in which to practice. You’re among your friends and peers; you’ll never have a friendlier audience. Finally, develop some specific strategies that will help you to participate. Write down a couple of questions or comments and bring them to class. Make note of a passage in the text that seemed particularly puzzling; ask if the group could turn to that passage and work through it. Make a pact with yourself that you’re going to make one comment in a class, then two, then three. Participation in a class is a skill; it can’t happen without practice.

I’m getting a little nervous. Am I supposed to be afraid of the seminars?

No, there is absolutely no reason to be afraid of the seminars. While the format of a seminar may be somewhat new to you, the task at hand—literary criticism—is not. You’ve had three years of reading and studying a wide variety of literary forms and styles; that is, you’ve had three years in which to gain a significant amount of knowledge about literature and how we study it. You’ve had three years to learn the difference between passively consuming a text and actively engaging with it, to work on critical reading and writing, and you’ve had three years to overcome the weaknesses from which your work may have initially suffered. Here, finally is your chance to show off the result of all that work. The seminars are your chance to actively demonstrate what you’ve learned. Some nervousness is good; it means you’re taking things seriously. But there’s no need to get overwhelmed. The seminars are certainly challenging, but we wouldn’t offer them unless we were confident that serious and dedicated students can and will succeed in them.