Tentative Schedule for Spring Semester
CLASS WEEK
LITERATURE
HISTORY, ART, MUSIC
Week 1: January 6- Beckett, Pinter, Churchill
Postmodernism
8, 2016
Modern British Poetry and Stories
Weeks 2-3:
Victorian Novel Research Paper BritLIST selections
January 11-22
Charlotte and Emily Brontë,
Publication of Victorian Novels
Dickens, Hardy, Eliot, Thackeray
British Nationalism
discussion groups
Victorian Web site
Focus on plot, characterization,
Victorian Novel Research draft
Research Articles for discussions
setting, tone
Week 4:
Victorian Language
Group Presentations on novels:
January 25-29
Gothic (Jane Eyre and Wuthering My Fair Lady
Heights*), Realist (A Tale of Two
Cities and Hardy*), Psychological
and Satiric (Middlemarch* and
Vanity Fair* - * designates
Honors)
Peer Review of papers
Victorian Novel Research final
Week 5:
Introduction to Oscar Wilde
Aestheticist Movement
February 1-5
Dorian Gray; Importance of Being Ruskin on Painters; William
Earnest Worksheet on Earnest
Morris
Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories
Impressionism and J.M.W. Turner
Weeks 6- 8:
Novel of Manners (or Social
Austen Novel Analysis: Solo
February 8-26
Classes – before Realism)
Digital Presentations on novels;
Social Classes and Britain’s
Chapter Essay
Gerard Manley Hopkins
“Poor”
Weeks 9-11:
Romantic Poets and Frankenstein English Painters and Gardeners
March 1-18
Poetry Analysis Test
Synthesis Argument Essay for
Honors credit
Weeks 12-14:
Milton’s Paradise Lost
"The Story of English"
March 21 – April
The Dictionary and the Academy
Free Will Assignment
15
Johnson and Boswell, Addison,
Newspapers and the Middle Class
Wollstonecraft; Spring Essay
Swift’s Modest Proposal
Week 15:
English Ballads
The Ghost of Shakespeare debate
April 18-22
Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Will in the World
Weeks 16-18:
Richard III
Richard III by Ian McKellan
April 25-May 13
Looking for Richard
Richard III Adaptation
Shakespeare’s Theatres
The Street King
Weeks 19-21:
Chaucer and the Chaucerians
The Black Death
May 16 – June 2
A Knight's Tale
Chaucer’s “Prologue”
Adaptation
The scope and sequence of some of the included topics may be expanded, reduced or
shifted to accommodate class needs.