Literatures in English I: to 1700
Class Information
Instructor: Werth, Tiffany Jo
Time: MWF 11:00-11:50
Location: 26 Wellman
Description
Premodern England: Gods, monsters, marvels, humans, and the natural world
Course Description:
The aim of this course is to introduce you to the strange, worldly- and other-worldly deep history of English literature to prepare you for advanced study. We will focus on literature written in English prior to 1700. Covering a wide range of texts--religious polemic, poetry, drama, travel narratives, and prose fiction--we will explore the "strangeness" of premodern England: a world that is simultaneously familiar and unsettling in its difference from our own twenty-first century Pacific West Coast perspective. Religious reform, explosive mercantile growth, new world contact, catastrophic disease, the persistent threat of the Islamic Ottoman empire, as well as new technologies such as the printing press and the telescope, transformed how people understood the world around them, how they lived, loved, died, and how they wrote.
Of central importance as we read will be the development of the following skill set:
Critical Skill Objectives
Close reading and analysis
Reading and identifying premodern poetic and prose forms
Effectively researching in a range of historical databases
Summarizing and critiquing secondary criticism
Forming logically coherent arguments in response to given research topics
Identifying, summarizing, and interpreting the formal and cultural significance of textual passages
Grading
Course Requirements:
Lecture & Tutorial Attendance 5%
In Class Engagement Exercises via Top Hat 10%
Pop Reading Quizzes
(6 weekly quizzes with lowest score dropped) 10%
Literary Term & Close Reading Essay
(3-4 pp) 20%
Critical Research essay (6-8 pp) 30%
Final Exam 25%
Texts
Custom Textbook from Broadview Press
They Say I Say, Edited by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein