ENGL 2010 - The English Literary Tradition I

(HB) (LA-AS)

Fall. 4 credits.

ENGL 2010, not a prerequisite for ENGL 2020, may be used as one of the three pre-1800 courses required of English majors.

M. Raskolnikov.

An introduction to the study of English literature from its early history through the seventeenth century, emphasizing exceptional works and key periods of innovation. Readings will include Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in modern translation, selections from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, More’s Utopia, Book I of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, some sixteenth-century sonnets, Shakespeare’s King Lear, poems by Christopher Marlowe, Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney, John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and George Herbert, and parts of Milton’s Paradise Lost. We’ll focus on the distinctive features of these works-their genre, meter, rhetoric, and style-while also considering what it means to think about literature as history. Class format will be lecture and discussion; short assignments will encourage close reading and experimentation with literary techniques.