Honors Program

Courses

Honors

• HP / ENG 288 Beat Literature

  
  Prerequisite: ENG 102 
  3 credits
  
  This course focuses on the Beat American literary sub-culture that developed in the years following WWII, its counterparts in music, art and film, and the major writers who embodied this new movement (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, etc.). Students will read and analyze Beat masterpieces and discuss critical and biographical essays that focus on numerous Beat writers.
• HP / SOC 253 Elvis Presley and the American Dream

  
  Prerequisite: ENG 102 
  3 credits
  
  This course examines the life and influence of the cultural icon who, more than any public figure of the 20th century, embodies the racial, sexual, generational, historical and cultural tensions that had been fomenting for years but exploded with unexpected force across the American landscape of the 1950s. With a musical style and public persona that presaged the new social realities of the times, Elvis Presley was both prophet and pariah a musical cross over who blended the sacred and profane, and epitomized in his music, his films, his life, and his death, both the best and the worst of what America was and is. An additional, in-depth research paper will be required of all Honors students taking this course.