WINTER 2000
This information effective for Winter 2000.
Check with instructor the first day of class for any changes.
WINTER 2000
This information effective for Winter 2000.
Check with instructor the first day of class for any changes.
Instructor: M. Warren
This course has been offered over the years as both English Literature 100A, more recently as Pre- and Early Modern Literature 166, and most recently as LTBR 104.
The title describes the course accurately: it is primarily a study of works that have been traditionally associated with the idea of a canon of English Literature from Chaucer (late 14c.) to Cowper (d. 1800), but it also concerns the act of reading what has come to be known as "the canon." As such it provides a broad foundation for the study of earlier English literature. But it can also prove invaluable to students of later British and American literature and of Creative Writing by guiding them through many of the works that post-1800 writers and readers knew and know well.
The textbook is the Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume One. I expect that we shall be using the new seventh edition, (I have still to learn from Norton whether it will be indeed available for Winter Quarter). However, it is very important that no student spend money in advance on a secondhand copy of the sixth edition, since all the pagination and some of the material will be different if we are using the seventh edition. I use this anthology because its broad adoption throughout US colleges in its various forms since the early Sixties has given it a status in which it can be seen as contributing to defining what is and is not considered canonical (it has been revised significantly since it first appeared). I supplement the Norton with other material that I shall make available material written primarily by women in the period but not as yet included in the Norton, works which challenge the idea of "canon"; three years ago that material was in a reader, but the cost was unreasonable, and I shall probably continue to experiment with an alternative approach this year.
The course is a survey course and has all the virtues and vices of a survey. Students read a lot of material relatively rapidly. Lectures focus on particular writers, works, and genres; despite the survey mode there is a lot of attention to individual texts. Students will read Chaucer (from The Canterbury Tales), Elizabethan sonneteers (Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare) and pastoral and epic verse (Spenser), some of the the 17c. lyric poets (Wroth, Lanier, Donne, Jonson, Herbert, Marvell, Behn), Milton, 17c. prose writers (Bacon, Bunyan), Dryden, 18c. poets (Finch, Pope, Montagu, Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns), 18c. essayists (Addison, Johnson); and many others. Lectures address not just the interpretation of the texts but also the changes in forms and tastes in poetry and prose, the historical contexts of the works' production, and the physical nature of their publication; sections will provide the opportunity for intense study of particular works in smaller groups. At the end of the course the student should have a good foundation for further study in the period.
Students should have taken the lower division requirements of the major before enrolling; freshpersons are not admitted. LTBR 104A is an excellent course for students in their sophomore or junior years; it is particulary good as a first upper division course in the major. It is an especially valuable course for students contemplating graduate school in any English language literature, for students contemplating becoming high school teachers, and for students expecting to go on EAP to UK/I to study literature.
Two five-page papers, a midterm, and a final.
Instructor: M. Warren
Winter 2000
This upper division course will be devoted to the study of what, as the subject of A. C. Bradley's influential (but now very dated) book Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), used to be known as the Four Great Tragedies--Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth; all four plays were written over a period of probably six years at the beginning of the seventeenth century). We shall approach the texts as works designed for performance in the playhouses of the time, and shall give some consideration to the peculiar constitution of each play from the surviving printed documents. Because editions of three of these plays present significant variations one from another, I have not yet decided on the editions that we shall use in the classroom. We shall, however, certainly use The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare. The books will be ordered through The Literary Guillotine.
I expect to assign at least twenty pages of writing in the course; I do not at present anticipate including an exam.
Students enrolling should have a good foundation in the work of Shakespeare and (if possible) of his contemporaries. Students should have taken Literature 80S--Introduction to Shakespeare, or its equivalent; to have taken British Literature 102--English Renaissance Drama will be an advantage. The course enrollment is restricted to 35.