English 10B-2 - Fall, 2013

Literatures in English II: 1700-1900

Class Information

Instructor: Weise, Peter
CRN: 32327
Time: MWF 12:10-1:00
Location: 107 Wellman

Description

English 10B is the second course in the required Literatures in English. This is a reading- and writing-intensive course, intended to prepare you for upper-division course work in the English major. Lectures, discussions, and writing assignments will help you sharpen your skills of close reading with attention to the broader literary, political, and socio-economic problems of Anglophone literature from 1700–1900. We will be reading prose, novels, plays, and poetry by writers from England, Ireland, the United States, the Caribbean, and India. The overriding question for this class is, How do the forms of the English language correspond with a complex array of different political subjects in this period? Important topics for the course will include: print culture and capitalism; colonialism, empire, and slavery; sentimentalism; the French Revolution; social class and Romanticism; “minor” literature; the working class; transcendentalism; and aestheticism.

Grading

Subject to change:

Paper #1 23%
Paper #2 27%
Quizzes and in-class writing 10%
Final Exam 25%
Participation 15%

Texts

Robinson Crusoe, Defoe
The Man of Feeling, Mackenzie
Course Reader
Autobiography, Franklin
Leaves of Grass, Whitman
Narrative, Douglass
The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde