I wanted to alert you to an opportunity for a needs-based scholarship for ENGL majors/minors. Please apply if you have financial needs: it’s a pretty simple application process!!

The Dorothy Horowitz Scholarship [English Majors + Minors only]

November 22nd – December 6th 

The English Department is now accepting submissions to The Dorothy Horowitz Scholarship, the English Department’s only need-based scholarship. Awards will be made of up to $1000 each.

Eligibility: Open to all undergraduate and graduate students in English. Applicants must be in good academic standing. Priority will be given to students who are experiencing hardship.

To Apply: Submit one copy of a recent transcript and one copy of a 300-word personal essay (.docx, .rtf or .pdf) that outlines the circumstances of financial need and describes how you intend to use the prize. Please use this form for submission

The Department will consider applications to the prize between November 23 – December 6th. Depending on the availability of funds the department will open another application window in the Spring semester.

Please also note: as much as we would like it to be, the Horowitz Prize is not an emergency fund. Even after the award is announced, it may take a few months to be distributed. As we hope you know, there are other emergency resources that the College offers, which are listed here.

If you have any questions, please reach out to the English Department at [email protected].

Discuss in small groups for 15 mins. Designate someone (preferably a “lifeline”) to represent the main points to peers at the end:

1. Weather is a first-person novel, if an unconventional one. The narrative, therefore, issues from an “I.” But who is that “I” addressing? For much of the novel, it feels as if we readers are “overhearing” something private and inner, but starting in Part Five the “you” starts to loom larger. How do you read the pivot towards the second person in the novel, toward us as readers, in effect? How does it change the tone of the novel in the last two sections?
2. The novel form is organized around endings: as with an individual life, we don’t know what the beginning and the middle mean, in some sense, until the end. Lizzie is obsessed with worry about how things will end: her son’s childhood, her marriage, her brother’s mental health, and, well, the state of the entire world. How does the novel negotiate its own ending? How does the ending make you feel? How does the “closure” the novel provides reflect back on its own many references to time and temporality?
3. Religion, or its more informal and secular cousin spirituality, is a theme common to all three texts we’ve read this term. Lizzie approaches religion with a mix of longing and irony throughout the novel, most notably when she and Ben attempt to be Unitarian Universalists. How does religion, or at least a spiritual feeling, return at the end of the novel? What do you think Offill is getting at with the references to sacred feelings and practices as the novel closes?

Think for 2 mins, Pair for 2 mins, Share for a bit:

We’ve done a lot of close reading of literary critical essays this term (with two more to come next week). What skills have you developed? When confronted with the narrow, specialized form of the critical essay, what are you able to do with it, as a reader, that you couldn’t a few months ago? How might this impact your ability as a writer of your own critical essays?

Two TPSs today: one on research, one on Offill:

What’s your usual procedure in kicking off research, once you have a prompt or a self-generated question or thesis? How did that procedure differ this time, if at all? How did you initiate the search for sources? Did you have to modify your search as you went?

In The Great Derangement, Ghosh points out that the realist novel grew out of an era of great faith in “incrementalism,” the belief that nature evolves in a slow-moving, predictable way. Just as novel plots that rely on sudden, unmotivated decisions by characters or implausible, atypical disasters (like the tornado he experienced in his youth in New Delhi) seem “unrealistic” and cheap, scientific hypotheses that rely on unpredictable, sudden changes (like the once-scoffed-at notion that a meteor triggered the mass extiction of the dinosaurs) were rejected out of hand.

How does Offill’s novel relate to this idea? How do its form and themes engage the questions of what’s “realistic” in the Anthropocene?