English 10B-3 - Spring, 2014

Literatures in English II: 1700-1900

Class Information

Instructor: Page, Ryan
CRN: 42874
Time: MWF 12:10-1:00
Location: 229 Wellman

Description

English 10B is the second of the three part Literatures in English sequence required for all majors. This section will cover the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, encompassing poetry, prose and drama from the heyday of the Enlightenment to the birth of Modernism. The object of the Literatures in English sequence is to familiarize you with key historical developments and transformations in literary form while improving your reading and writing skills in preparation for upper division course work. After completing this class, you should not only be able to discuss the pragmatics of literary form, but also the intellectual and historical contexts of works produced during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and you should have the beginnings of a critical methodology which with to pursue original research.

In this particular section of English 10B, we will be focusing primarily on the evolution of individualism: that is, the creation of private, exclusive selfhoods in the modern age, as well as the resistance to and dangers of such selfhoods; a crisis that often emerges within the context of narratives of movement, travel, and economic exchange. I have listed below those texts which will be available for purchase at the bookstore; other poems and stories in the public domain will be rendered as PDF's on the course website.

Grading

Participation, attendance, short writing assignments and quizzes: 15%
Paper 1: 20%
Paper 2: 30%
4 Critical Interventions (submitted online): 20%
Final: 15%

Texts

Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe
Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin
She Stoops to Conquer, Oliver Goldsmith
History of Mary Prince, Mary Prince
The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson
Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser
Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth & Samuel Taylor Coleridge