[ficbot]

I received an alumni newsletter from my alma mater the other day which detailed some changes to the English program. When I was there back on 1996-2000, the program was set up with about a dozen categories organized around various time periods, and you had to take prescribed amounts from each grouping (for instance, there was a grouping which included Beowulf, Shakespeare and the Restoration and you had to take two of the three).

The new program simplifies things a little by making pretty much everything in the first two years compulsory (year 1 emphasizes theory and how to study literature, year 2 is the general survey course and then in year 3 you can go deeper into time periods that interested you in year 2. One of the compulsory upper-year seminar courses is a novel study whereby you work on a single text for the entire semester in great detail.

This is an intriguing idea to me and I am wondering what novels they might pick. I recognize each professor will have their own area of expertise and preferred teaching materials (I once took an upper-year seminar with the generic title 'Post-Colonial Literature' which, due to the professor's provenance, consisted exclusively of works from South Africa). But I am assuming the department will vet the choices for this seminar given that the students will be saddled with the chosen books for an entire term and given that I imagine the goals must be broad enough that a student who takes it with one professor over another will still come out of it with a similar enough experience.

So, what books do you think they might choose for such a course? The newsletter offered no examples or particulars other than the concept itself, of a novel study course where you spend an entire semester reading just the one book, in great detail.