ENGLISH - Distribution II: hu

Institution:

University of Massachusetts-Boston

Subject:

Description:

As we read literature produced by five British writers across a span of six centuries, we will explore the idea of the 'life' of a text. Literature is famed for its ability to transcend history, to be immortal. Geoffrey Chaucer's poetry has been read continuously and widely from his own lifetime to the current day, more than six hundred years, far longer than the writer or any of his readers could hope to live. Yet literature is also peculiarly vulnerable to the force of history, which can entirely reshape the way in which we experience a text, even the form a text takes. No one who lived during William Shakespeare's time needed footnotes to explain any of the jokes in his plays-indeed, in Shakespeare's lifetime there were no readers of his plays at all, only viewers, since play scripts based on his manuscripts were not published until after his death. Literature thus both reflects and resists its historical context and its writers' intentions. We can see this interaction when we juxtapose John Keats' private letters about poetic imagination with his poetry, for example, or if we compare readers' responses to t he novel J ane Eyre in the years following the revelation of Charlotte Bront 's authorship to how the novel was received when it was first published under the masculine-sounding name of Currer Ellis, because Bront feared prejudice against 'authoresses'. Ultimately, literature plays an important role in how we think about history, about our relationship to the past, and about how we see time passing. M artin Amis' Time's Arrow provides one twentieth-century writer's approach to this theme, as the text attempts to narrate an entire lifetime lived b Our explorations of five writers' varied literature, and its place in history, is limited to only one semester's time and will require the careful reading of texts and active participation in class discussion, as well as the completion of written exercises and a combination of papers and tests.

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.umb.edu

Phone Number:

(617) 287-5000

Regional Accreditation:

New England Association of Schools and Colleges

Calendar System:

Semester

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