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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
This course will look back to the very beginnings of British literature and language to trace the birth of literary forms and ideas that still preoccupy and excite today: the memoir, the novel, the love story, the narrative of pilgrimage. The survey will begin with such foundational texts as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and continue through to the early modern period in the 17th century, taking in masterworks by writers such as Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, and Congreve. All of the readings will be considered in a literary and historical context so that the student will gain an understanding of the cultural and philosophical influences that shaped the texts. Same as WLT 11. Prerequisites of ENG 1 and ENG 2 are required.
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3.00 Credits
This course examines varying perspectives on the black experience. Most writers - blacks, whites, and "passers" - are from the United States, but England, Russia, France, and the West Indies share the stage. We begin and end with autobiography, moving from the public persona of Frederick Douglass to the confessional of Jamaica Kincaid. Cultural differences and diverse points of view are addressed: blacks writing about blacks, whites writing about blacks, and "passers" avoiding racial themes. In attempting to define the black experience, we pose the crucial question - does culture trump color? Prerequisites of ENG 1 and ENG 2 are required.
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3.00 Credits
The early modern period of English culture was a time of unprecedented social change during which the very concepts of the universe, society, and national and personal identity were re-negotiated. Astronomers saw chaos in the stars. Believers murdered each other in the name of religion. Nation states consolidated power and became colonial empires. Individuals, turning inward, confronted with renewed energy the question of what it meant to be human. The purpose of this course is to examine the astounding variety of literary forms (such as lyric poetry, drama, epic, and essay) and philosophical perspectives that were invented during the reigns of Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and James I. Students will be encouraged to rediscover this brave new world of renaissance and revolution in the "golden age" of English literature. To that end, it emphasizes the literary, historical, and cultural contexts for understanding the work of such key authors as Sir Thomas Wyatt, Christopher Marlowe, Sir Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Sir Francis Bacon, and Ben Jonson. Prerequisites of ENG 1 and ENG 2 are required.
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3.00 Credits
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Great Britain was the richest and most powerful nation on earth and had experienced remarkable stability and peace for many decades. Yet revolutionary change was coming: England would fight two catastrophic wars within the next twenty-five years, its empire would begin to collapse, its wealth would disintegrate, and its young would question every inherited value, including articles of religious faith, traditional institutions, and customary perspectives. The literature written during this century reflects these changed realities, and it is rich, provocative, challenging and disturbing. It performs distinctly modern experiments with some of the traditional components of literature'the use of myth, the rendering of human consciousness, the operations of narrative point of view, and the reordering of form. This course will explore the value of the past and the collapse of traditional sources of meaning and authority; changing gender roles and family structures; the bitter legacy of World War I (the first war of mass destruction); sex as a liberating - yet sometimes destructive - force; and the brutal exploitation that colonialism and capitalism engendered. We will see the shock of the new in this literature, as well as both the terror and excitement of change. Prerequisites of ENG 1 and ENG 2 are required.
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3.00 Credits
Often described as the period in which the genre of the novel was created and developed into a dominant form of literature for an educated reading public, the eighteenth century was a turbulent period of struggle between various ideological forces that would transform British society. As a period that gave rise to what would eventually be characterized as the realist novel, the eighteenth century provided its great authors with a focus that enabled them to record the emergence of the individual as a historical entity. In addition to providing early examples of criminal, realist, sentimental, and Gothic novels, the eighteenth century furnished its authors with a wide range of material generated by the emergence of capitalism, travel and exploration, the development of colonialism, religious conflict, and the rise of experimental science. These changes also generated intellectual conflict between conservative, antiscientific Humanists and utilitarian, profit-oriented Moderns, a conflict that plays a prominent role in much of the fiction generated during the period. Possible authors covered in the class include: Defoe, Swift, Burney, Fielding, Radcliffe, Richardson, Sterne, and Smollett. Prerequisites of ENG 1 and ENG 2 are required.
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3.00 Credits
In the 19th century the novel reached its fullest and richest development. Readers came to novels to feel empathy for characters much like themselves: who toiled to earn a living, experienced the difficulties of love, found themselves lost in the chaos of cities made newly dangerous by industrialization. Realism came to dominate the form, and this course will be attentive to the way the novel remained vitally connected to the current social world, in particular its exploration of poverty, class, gender roles, and the modern city. But in the beginning of the 19th century other movements were still in force: Romanticism and the Gothic. Their anti-realist themes - altered states of consciousness, madness, and the supernatural - thread their way throughout the century, leading one to question the usefulness of the term "Realism." Novelists covered will include Austen, the Brontës, Dickens, George Eliot, Gaskell, Thackeray, Trollope, Collins, Hardy, Conrad, and Wilde. Prerequisites of ENG 1 and ENG 2 are required.
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3.00 Credits
This course will examine novels written in English during the last sixty years'works produced after the two cataclysmic World Wars of the last century and the collapse of colonialism in places like India, Southeast Asia, and Africa. The last half of the century were nation-changing and tumultuous decades, characterized by cultural collisions and transformations that have produced a rich and rewarding literature. Thus some of the novels considered in this course have been written by writers emigrating to the West from countries like India, Africa, and Sri Lanka. Some of it is written by writers who have stayed put in their native lands, and whose work reflects the substantial changes occasioned there by the end of colonialism and sometimes fierce resistance to these changes. Many, but not all, of the novels assigned in this course can be called "Post-modernist." Like many of the literary works produced early in the century, the literature of the second half of the twentieth century often disavows narratives that in previous centuries largely explained and ordered life. Different instructors of this course will naturally choose to focus on different writers. Prerequisites of ENG 1 and ENG 2 are required.
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3.00 Credits
Many critics assert that William Butler Yeats (1865- 1939), Irish poet, statesman, dramatist, mythologist, cultural activist and nationalist, produced the finest poems written in English in the 20th century. While heavily influenced by Celtic (pre-Christian) mythology and folk tales, Yeats' work was also affected by the revolutionary tenor of his times, and in particular, by Ireland's struggle to achieve political independence from England. Many of Yeats' finest poems are political in nature, but there are many other themes which recur in his poetry - his love for the beautiful, ardent revolutionary, Maude Gonne, for example; his admiration for Byzantium (the ancient name for modern-day Istanbul in Turkey) where, according to Yeats, the religious, aesthetic and practical parts of life were harmoniously unified; and the conflict between the spirit and the body (or between other dualities) which preoccupied him all his life and which are resolved differently in different poems. We will examine all of these themes. Students will have ample practice in this course in reading and interpreting short poems. Prerequisites of ENG 1 and ENG 2 are required.
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3.00 Credits
This course will consider works from four literary periods: the Neoclassical (1690-1744), Romantic (1785-1830), Victorian (1830-1901), and Modern and its "Posts" (1901- ?). While the primary concern will be on close readings, this class will also explore what these texts say about the aesthetic and social concerns of the time. Tracing varying understandings of the "self" and its relationship to nature, society, and language, this class will be attentive to changing ideas about gender roles, socio-economic class, and religion during these numerous historical moments. Authors covered will include Fielding, Sterne, Richardson, and Defoe, Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Austen, Dickens, Tennyson, George Eliot, T.S. Eliot, Yeats, Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett. Prerequisites of ENG 1 and ENG 2 are required.
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3.00 Credits
This course offers an introduction to the short story and its development since the nineteenth century. What are some of the characteristics and conventions of short fiction? How do we understand a short story differently in the context of a collection? What are some of the challenges of this format? These readings will enable us to examine various literary genres as well as several major artistic movements, including Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism, Modernism, Postmodernism, Post-colonialism, and Minimalism. Some possible authors include Hawthorne, Poe, Twain, Flaubert, Chekov, James, Joyce, Lawrence, Mansfield, Faulkner, Kafka, Hemingway, O'Connor, Walker, Beattie, Carver, and Lahiri. Same as WLT 13. Prerequisites of ENG 1 and ENG 2 are required.
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