English 10A-3 - Winter, 2012

Literatures in English I: to 1700

Class Information

Instructor: Dawkins, Claire
CRN: 54891
Time: TR 12:10-1:30
Location: 101 Olson

Description

The aim of this course is prepare you for advanced study in English literature. Our focus will be literature written in English before 1700, a period of fascinating historical, political, social, and linguistic transformation. We will read texts from a range of authors and genres that reflect, address, and helped produce these changes. Topics we will consider include: the development of both the English language and literary genres; emerging national identity and England’s relationship to the new world; the status of the monarchy during periods of political growth and unrest; and women’s participation in the literary world. Of paramount importance will be students’ development of skills in reading, discussing, and writing about the literature. Specifically, we will work on three kinds of skills: (1) seeing a big picture by spanning time and surveying the globe to track the emergence, development, and dissemination of the English language and its literatures; (2) focusing carefully on key literary texts and some strategies for interpreting them, or “close reading,” of poetry, prose, and drama; and (3) positioning your interpretation of a literary text in relation to other scholarship on it.

Readings from the Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol 1.
Beowulf
The Wife of Bath’s Prologue & Tale, Chaucer
The Faerie Queene, selections, Spenser
Twelfth Night, Shakespeare
The Duchess of Malfi, Wester
Paradise Lost, selections, Milton
Oroonoko , Behn
The Narrative of the Captivity and the Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, Rowlandson
The Masque of Blackness, Jonson
Seventeenth-century poetry selections, Donne, Jonson, and Wroth

Grading

Attendance and Quizzes: 15%
Midterm Exam: 15%
Close Reading Paper: 20%
Research Paper: 30% (includes an annotated bibliography)
Final Exam: 20%

Texts

Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol 1, Greenblatt