Spring Honors College Retro Readings to Explore Angling, Presidential Speeches and the Quran

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In Honors College Retro Readings courses, students from all colleges tackle classic texts from a contemporary, multidisciplinary point of view. Next spring students will witness an expansion of topics and offerings, with courses available on presidential speeches, the Quran, and angling in literature. Previous topics include the Bible, Fulbright Internationalism, the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and Darwin.

These 75-minute, one-credit-hour honors courses pair students with expert faculty to provide them with a "Great Books" experience, one of the hallmarks of a liberal arts education. 

"These courses allow our students, many of whom are deeply immersed in STEM fields, to really dig deep into literary history," said Lynda Coon, dean of the Honors College and professor for Bible, one of the current Retro Readings courses. "We couldn't be more excited about the partnerships these courses afford us with departments across campus."

Honors students must apply to participate in Retro Readings courses, and seats are capped at 12 per class. Interested students are encouraged to read more about the courses and professors on the Retro Readings web page.

The final deadline to apply is 11:59 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 25.

Our Spring 2019 Retro Readings are: 

• Angling: Creative writing professor and award-winning poet Geffrey Davis will guide students through a variety of classic and contemporary representations of fishing in literature and popular culture, from Dame Juliana Berners' The Treatise of Fishing with an Angle in the 15th century to Ernest Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea in the 20th. Through these texts, students will discover new authors and modes of literary analysis involving the representation of existential struggle through metaphor and motif. While students will find that some texts assume an audience of anglers, they need never have picked up rod and reel to appreciate the insights discovered via our narratives and images for fishing.

• Presidential Speeches: Honors College Assistant Dean Noah Pittman will engage students in an in-depth analytical and context-based discussion of some of the most famous presidential speeches in our nation's history. Each week the class will study a different speech, focusing not just on the language used, but also the historical context surrounding the address. Throughout the semester, students will consider a number of different topics, including what determines a speech's lasting power, how to measure a speech's impact on public opinion and mood, and the evolution of speech rhetoric through the years.

• Quran: In this course, led by comparative literature professor Mohja Kahf, students will examine the Quran not only as a religious book, but also as a work of literature, and will engage with the text as a historical and social artifact. Students will glimpse an array of Sunni and Shia as well as Sufi approaches to the Quran, along with modern feminist and LGBTQ approaches to the text. Students in this course will draw from a wide variety of academic perspectives in their explorations, including religious studies, rhetorical analysis, gender studies and translation.