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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Detailed study of the life and work of John Milton, with attention to cultural, political, and intellectual backgrounds. Selected major and minor poems and prose with emphasis on "Paradise Lost." Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better. Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: This is a course on the life and work of John Milton. Students read a selection of the "minor" poems, a few Latin ones in translation, Paradise Lost, and Samson Agonistes, as well as selections from some of the major prose works, including Areopagitica. In this course we pay close attention to the ways in which Milton conceived of and then reconceived of himself as an author (as a scholar, a polemicist, and a poet) in response to the sometimes rapidly changing personal and historical circumstances that he confronted in his life. We pay particular attention to the literary and intellectual backgrounds of his work as we examine the ways in which he absorbed and rethought, resisted and rewrote what he understood to be his cultural inheritance, and how he did so in accordance with a set of often highly idiosyncratic religious and political views. Because his achievement ultimately rests on his technical mastery of the craft of writing, we also pay a good deal of attention to the structure of his verse and of his pamphlets. Above all, our task is to establish a flexible, open-ended (and open-minded) relationship with this writer, whose work invites us to do so despite the "vast interrupt" that separates us from the time and place in which he wrote.
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3.00 Credits
The development of the epic, including works by Homer, Virgil, and Dante. Particular attention will be paid to the role of epic poetry in formulating notions of history and of national and cultural identity. Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better. Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: The epic is one of the oldest forms in literature, and it has proved remarkably durable over time. Originally, the form was a long narrative poem in elevated style, involving a protagonist or protagonists of heroic stature, who figured in a number of independent episodes loosely grouped together. It has proved a potent form, appropriated through history to a number of political, religious, and ideological projects. It has also proved highly adaptable to changing literary tastes and radical reformulations of what constitutes "the heroic." This course surveys the beginnings of English epic in Beowulf, and samples a range of texts, in whole or in part, from the following list among others: Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queen, John Milton's Paradise Lost, William Wordsworth's Excursion, Walt Whitman's Song of Myself, and T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets. Alternative versions, like the mock epic, are represented as well, by works like Pope's Rape of the Lock, Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews, and Lord Byron's Don Juan.
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3.00 Credits
An interdisciplinary approach to the study of Middle Ages and Renaissance. Medieval and Renaissance perspectives on topics such as love, politics, individualism, and the divine will be explored through study of selected works from literature, art, architecture, political theory, theology, and philosophy of both periods. Modern historiographical studies also will be examined in order to evaluate strengths and weaknesses of period constructions. May be repeated for credit if topic varies. Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better. Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: The purpose of this course is to explore the cultures of the Middle Ages and Renaissance from the perspective of a number of different fields of inquiry. These fields include the history of art and architecture, literature, philosophy, religious studies, history, and political philosophy. The basic assumption behind this course is that the various kinds of artifacts, physical or conceptual, that a culture produces constitute together a unique symbolic "universe." In order to interpret this universe of signs and symbols, whose meanings have been blurred by the passage of time, it is often illuminating to explore their rich and complex interrelations. Thus, for example, by studying together Michelangelo's David, Luther's Freedom of a Christian, and Shakespeare's Hamlet, it is possible not only to further one's understanding of each of these works, but also to achieve a more complex and thus more accurate insight into Renaissance conceptions of the human self. Such an interdisciplinary study of a distant era fosters a capacity for intellectual flexibility, as students are asked to learn some of the "languages" of these historical periods and to fit together from them a version of a coherent culture. The point of this course, it should be noted, is not necessarily to trace the influence of one work on another. Depending on the instructor, this course places more emphasis either on the Middle Ages or on the Renaissance. The course usually has a subtitle that describes the particular theme or topic it will focuses on. For example, "Empire, Antiquity, and Myth: The Idea of Rome in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance" explores the various and often compelling ways in which poets, artists, theologians and political theorists in this period incorporated and constructed conceptions about ancient Rome and classical antiquity in their works. Another version of the course is entitled "The Divine, the Will, and the Performative Self." It begins with Augustine's Confessions and goes on to explore the works of Boethius, Spenser, and Chaucer, Gothic Architecture, and Giotto's frescoes, among other texts.
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3.00 Credits
A comparative investigation of Italian, French, and English Renaissance lyric poetry. (Same as Modern Literatures and Cultures 358.) General Education Requirement: (FSLT) Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: In this course we trace the development of lyric poetry from the 14th to the 17th centuries, a period of time that spanned the Italian, French, and English Renaissance. The nature of the self and of its relation to the other remains a central concern in all the works examined in this course, though the perspectives articulated differ widely. Some of the more specific questions or issues to be investigated include: 1) the relation between the poetic imagination and reality. To what degree does imagination reveal or occlude truth To what degree is the self an unstable poetic construct rather than a divinely constituted and fixed "essence" Does the self create its own fragmented and illusory reality, or does it inhabit a coherent universe structured by God 2) the relation between self and other, especially as played out in the context of romantic love. Is physical beauty a manifestation of the divine Can physical desire be sublimated into spiritual passion Is it possible to have both Is genuine contact with an "other" possible To what degree can the beloved survive the process of absorption into a poetic text 3) the relation between the poet and his predecessors, between imitation and originality. 4) the relation between ethics and aesthetics. What kind of knowledge does lyric poetry provide Can poetry be transformative or redemptive, or is it inherently about itself Is poetic creation an act that reflects or parodies/perverts divine creation What is the proper relation between art and nature 5) the relation between poet/poem and the social and political context out of which the work emerge
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3.00 Credits
Focus on representative British authors of the late 17th and 18th centuries. Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better. Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: In this course students study works by representative British writers of the late seventeenth century (the so-called Restoration period, 1660-1700) and the eighteenth century (often divided by literary historians into two segments, the Augustan Age from 1700-1745, and The Age of Johnson or the Age of Sensibility from 1745-1789). Though the term "neoclassicism," which points to the concern of many writers during this long period, including the major poets John Dryden and Alexander Pope and the great satirist Jonathan Swift, with the literary models established by ancient Greek and Roman writers, is often applied to the entire period (sometimes called "the long eighteenth century"), and though many important works from the time are comic plays and prose or verse satires (both comedy and satire were traditional or "classical" literary genres or modes), the period is notable for the invention of a number of major new kinds of literature, most notably the novel (the works, principally, of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Tobais Smollett, Frances Burney, and Laurence Sterne) and modern autobiography and biography (for example, the most literary of all English-language biographies, James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson). Most of the writers in this period in British literary history, which is part of the broader, European-wide phenomenon known as the Enlightenment, try through their works to come to terms with rapidly changing cultural trends that we now associate with the term "modernity."
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3.00 Credits
Focus on major British authors of the early 19th century with some attention to European currents and backgrounds. Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better. Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: Along with the Renaissance, the Romantic era represents one of the two great intellectual watersheds of Western culture. The industrial revolution, political upheavals in Europe and America, the founding of democracies and the growth of capitalism, secular assaults on religion, liberal humanism and new conceptions of the individual, all made for a tempestuous era of paradigm shifts across the spectrum. In the realm of aesthetics, literary models underwent their most dramatic transformations since antiquity. We study some of the intellectual and cultural underpinnings behind Romanticism and examine some of the movement's early manifestations in France and Germany, before turning to the study of British Romanticism proper. Figures to be studied include Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Goethe, Blake, Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, and Shelley.
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3.00 Credits
Analysis of major texts produced in colonial British North America and the United States from the first European voyagers to North America in the early 17th century to the writers of the Early National period. Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 or American Studies 201 with a grade of C or better. Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: The earliest American writings were by definition travel literature. The early explorers and settlers described the land, its inhabitants, and their ventures in the new world. These early travelers began a long tradition of travel writing by and about America. Over the course of the semester we study a number of key texts in American travel literature from 1590 to 1840. We read books by English and African travelers to America, as well as books by Americans traveling across and beyond the continent. Some of the questions we pursue include: how was the notion of America, and more precisely of the United States, shaped by the experience of traveling In what ways is U.S. American identity built upon this legacy of travelers and traveling How do ideas about mobility, the landscape, and space, for example, work to construct a distinct American ethos and literature
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3.00 Credits
Readings in the traditional American Renaissance canon -- Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville and Whitman -- as well as other writers working in the period, such as Poe and Dickinson. Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 or American Studies 201 with a grade of C or better. Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: This course examines the diverse texts that emerged during the American Renaissance, a period from roughly 1840 to 1865, which saw the first great flowering of a distinctly American literature. In addition to focusing on canonical writers (Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman), students also explore how writers from different classes, races, and genders contributed to discussions of national significance, including debates over slavery, women's and Native Americans' rights, industrialization, and national expansion. Ultimately, then, the course examines how writers perceived literature's role in the larger question of what it means to be an American in such a time of excitement, change, and uncertainty.
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3.00 Credits
Selected American works from the Early National period through the Civil War, with attention to the political and cultural contexts of these works. Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 or American Studies 201 with a grade of C or better. Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: This course begins with a consideration of the American Enlightenment-an intellectual and cultural shift that coincides with the American Revolution and that marks the decline of Anglo-Puritanism and the emergence of secular rationalism. Emphasis is placed on how notions of Enlightenment help to inform American thought during the Revolutionary period and discussions surround some of the following issues: reason (vs. emotion), autonomy, objectivity, self-governance, "the People," consent, equality, liberty, revolution, public and private sphere, among others. The course then turns to the nineteenth century in order for students to consider how nineteenth-century writers inherit and rethink these concerns. Students explore how nineteenth-century narrative sustains and extends the national culture that was first being imagined during the Revolutionary period, paying particular attention to Romanticism as a literary (and philosophical) mode. The course concludes on the eve of America's second and most substantial crisis: the Civil Wa
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3.00 Credits
Topics will vary from semester to semester. May be repeated for credit as topic varies. Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better. Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: This course allows the selection of topics arising in other period courses for more in-depth study. Examples may include "Romance, Allegory, and Mysticism in Medieval Literature," "Eros, Magic, and the Divine in the Renaissance Imagination," "The Poetry of John Donne," or "Nationalism and the Novels of Cooper and Scott." Topics vary by semester, and the course may be taken more than once for credit.
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