Syllabus I:
English 242/242H: Literary History
Description:
In this class, we’ll think about transformations in literature across time. We’ll ask how
literary traditions have been identified and constructed in the past and consider some
approaches available to us for defining and describing them now. How have authors
generated and transformed traditions by responding to the work of earlier writers, and
how do the “same kinds” of literary texts communicate their changeable preoccupations
in different cultural circumstances and historical moments? In the four segments of our
course, we construct historical traditions around four different literary foci: a poetic form
(the sonnet); a narrative form (the legend: we choose the quasi-historical stories of King
Arthur); a poetic mode, the elegy; and a theme, “new worlds.”
Weeks 1-4: The Sonnet
Spenser, sonnets from Amoretti, Epithalamion
Sidney, sonnets from Astrophil and Stella
Shakespeare, selected sonnets
Thomas Wyatt, “Whoso List to Hunt”
George Meredith, “Lucifer in Starlight,” selections from Modern Love
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, selections from Sonnets from the Portuguese
Christina Rossetti, selections from Monna Innominata
Bishop, “Sonnet”; Claude McKay, “America”; Thom Gunn, “Flooded Meadows,” “High
Fidelity”; Berryman, selections from The Dream Songs
Weeks 5-6: Arthurian Legend
Malory, excerpts from Le Morte D’Arthur
Tennyson, “Morte d’Arthur,” excerpts from Idylls of the King
William Morris, from The Defence of Guenevere
Twain, excerpts from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
Weeks 7-10: Elegy
Milton, “Lycidas”
Jonson, “On My First Son”
Dryden, “To the Memory of Mr. Oldham”
Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”
Shelley, “Adonais”
Tennyson, In Memoriam
Whitman, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”
Dickinson, “Because I could not stop for death,” “The Last Night That She Lived,”
“This Chasm, Sweet, upon my life”
Eliot, The Waste Land
Mark Doty, “Turtle, Swan,” “Paradise,” “Cemetery Road”
Billy Collins, “The Names”
Weeks 11-14: New Worlds
Milton, Paradise Lost, excerpts
Margaret Cavendish The Blazing World, excerpts
Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, excerpts
Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”
Blake, from Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience
Christina Rossetti, “Goblin Market”
Oscar Wilde, “Pan”
Tutuola, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
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)