Syllabus III
English 241/241H The Text in Its Historical Moment
General Description: This course focuses on the question of how literary works are
enmeshed in their historical circumstances, circumstances that include both literary
traditions (i.e., the realm of literary history) and material, economic, social, and
political conditions. Methodological readings will emphasize a variety of different
ways to approach the historical enmeshment of literary works (with examples
drawn, for instance, from materialist/Marxist, cultural studies, reception-oriented,
feminist/queer, and critical race approaches). Literary works will be considered in
historical relation to each other, and alongside contemporary non-literary writings
or, when appropriate, other cultural objects, like documentary films or works of
material culture. The course will include at least some material from pre-1800 and
at least some material from post-1800, and it will include material from at least two
geographical locations.
One Possible Reading List
This particular version of the course will focus upon questions about history by
looking at two different historical crises: the tensions in the British state during the
1680s leading up to the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688; and the world-wide crisis of
modernity following World War I.
The course would begin with a theoretical introduction on the way in which social
and political struggles are engaged in literary as well as non-literary texts, with
readings from Kenneth Burke ("Literature as Equipment for Living"), R.S. Crane
(Critical and Historical Principles of Literary History), Stephen Greenblatt (Practicing
New Historicism) and Franco Moretti (Graphs, Maps, Trees).
Part I: Period Texts 1679-1690
John Dryden: "Absalom and Achitophel" and "Mac Flecknoe"
Thomas Shadwell: "The Medal of John Bays"
Thomas Otway: Venice Preserv'd, or A Plot Discover'd
Nathanael Lee: The Massacre of Paris
Aphra Behn: Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave
John Locke: Second Treatise on Government (selections)
Roger Morrice: The Entring Book (selections)
The period texts will be supplemented by histories of the era beginning with
Edmund Burke's glorification of the 1689 Revolution in 1790 to Steven Pincus's
2005 history (with documents) of the decade of revolution.
Part II: Period Texts 1919-1929
Bernard Shaw: Heartbreak House
T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land
William Butler Yeats: Poems from The Tower: "The Second Coming"; "Nineteen
Hundred and Nineteen"; "Leda and the Swan"
Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse
Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Claude McKay: Home to Harlem
Selections from Chris Baldick: Writers Among the Ruins: Literature in the 1920s
David Ayers: English Literature of the 1920s
Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Claude McKay: Home to Harlem
Selections from Chris Baldick: Writers Among the Ruins: Literature in the 1920s
David Ayers: English Literature of the 1920s
Assignments
Two 4-6 page essays
An in-class midterm examination (short answer and essay format)
An in-class final examination (short answer and essay format)