Semester One
Readings: (Subject to Modification)
Topic: In transition
Lytton Strachey, “Queen Victoria at the End…” Tennyson, “On the Jubilee of Queen Victoria” A.E. Housman, “1887” Thomas Hardy, “The Man He killed” A.E. Housman, “Is my team plowing?” Thomas Hardy, “WorkBox” Thomas Hardy, “Hap” Thomas Hardy, “… Digging on my Grave?” H. Coombes, "Hardy, de la Mare, and Edward Thomas" |
WWI Poets
Edward Thomas “The Owl” & “Rain” Rupert Brooke, “The Soldier” Wilfred Owen, “The Owl”Sigfried Sassoon, "The Kiss" Sigfried Sassoon, “Sick Leave” Robert Graves, Good-bye to All That (Excerpt) Wilfred Owen, “Spring offensive” & “Dulce et Decorum Est” & Preface to Poems Issac Roseberg “Dead Man’s Dump” & “Daybreak…” Wilfred Owen “Arms and the Boy” Thomas Hardy, “Channel Firing” Neil Corcoran “Wilfred Owen and the poetry of War” (excerpt) |
Topic: ModernismRaymond Williams, "A Parting of Ways"
G.H. Bantock "The Social and Intellectual Background" Malcolm Bradbury, “London 1890-1920” D.H. Lawrence, “The Wild Common” D.H. Lawrence, “The Rocking-Horse Winner” Meyer Schapiro, "The Concept of Impressionism" Virginia Woolf, “On Modern Fiction” Virginia Woolf, “Street Haunting” Virginia Woolf,“Professions for Women” Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto Jean-Paul Sartre, “Why Write?” Stephen Spender, “The Express”& “What I Expected” W.H. Auden, “Spain” |
Topic: WWII and after
Stephen Spender, “The Coward” & “Polar Exploration” W.H. Auden, “In Time of War” & selected poems Winston Churchill , “Speech” George Orwell, “Politics and Literature” George Orwell, Animal Farm George Orwell, 1984 (excerpt) George Orwell, ‘Why I Write’ AldousHuxley Brave New World Huxley Interview (Clips) Sir Thomas More Utopia (excerpt) |
Of Interest:
Topic: Imperialism & Post-Colonialism
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (excerpt)
Nadine Gordimer, “Six Feet of the Country” Anita Desai, “A Devoted Son” Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea Sandra Drake, “Race and Caribbean Culture…” T.S. Eliot "The Hollowmen" Edgar Allan Poe "William Wilson" Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny" Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness Michael Levenson “The Value of Facts in the Heart of Darkness” Francis B. Singh “The Colonialistic Bias of Heart of Darkness” Apocalypse Now [Film] E.N. Dorall “Conrad and Coppola: Different Centres of Darkness” Louis K. Greiff “Conrad’s Ethics and the Margins of Apocalypse Now” Margot Norris, “Modernism and Vietnam” Subtopic: Cultural Imperialism & the Myth of 'the Native Speaker' Martha Nussbaum "Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism" |
Of Authors...
Semester Two
Nature, and Nature's Laws lay hid in Night:
God said, Let Newton be! and All was Light. ---Alexander Pope, "Epitaph" Not Newton's Art can show A Truth, perhaps, not fit for us to know --Mary Leapor, "The Enquiry" Nature compell'd, his piercing Mind, obeys, And gladly shews him all her secret Ways; Gainst Mathematicks she has no Defense, And yields t' experimental Consequence. ---John Desaguliers, "The Newtonian System..." |
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: --John Keats |
On Verse
Laurence Perrine, Sound and Sense (Selections) Brooks & Warren, Understanding Poetry (Selections) Richard Lovelace, "To Lucasta, going to the Wars" Robert Frost, "The Rose Family" Robert Burns, "A Red, Red Rose" Robert Burns, "Tam o' Shanter" William Blake, " The Echoing Green" William Blake, "The lamb" & "The Tyger" William Blake, "The Chimney Sweeper" William Blake, "London" Andrew Elfenbein, "Romantic Poetry & the Standardization of English" Susan Stewart, "Romantic Meter and Form " |
The Romantic PoetsWilliam Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads
William Wordsworth, "Tintern Abbey" Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Rime ..." Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Kubla Kahn" Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ozymandias" Percy Bysshe Shelley, "On Defense of Poetry" Percy Bysshe Shelley, 'Mont Blanc" Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ode to the West Wind" Percy Bysshe Shelley, "When the Lamp is Shattered" F.R. Leavis "Shelley" Frederick A. Pottle, "The Case of Shelley" David Hopes, "'Ode to the West Wind' and 'Mont Blanc': Shelley and the Method of the Sublime" Lord Byron, Childe Harold (Selections) John Keats, "Ode to Nightingale" John Keats, "Ode to Grecian Urn" John Keats, "Ode to Melancholy" Cleanth Brooks, "Keats's Sylvan Historian" Walter Jackson Bate, "Evolution toward qualities..." Grant F. Scott, "Keats and the Urn" Helen Vendler The Odes of Keats (Selections) |
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Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Christopher Small, "Shelley and Frankenstein" Ellen Moers, "Female Gothic: The Monster's Mother" Mary Poovey, "My Hideous Progeny" Anne K. Mellor, "Possessing Nature" Lawrence Lipking, "Frankenstein, the True Story" |
Mary Shelley & RomanticismRene Wellek, "The Concept of Romanticism"
Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (Selection) Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (Selection) Lord Byron, from Childe Harold Cantos I & III Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Sea of Ice" Mary Shelley, "Letter to Fanny Imlay" Polidori, "Letter Prefaced to The Vampyre" |
True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance, As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance, 'Tis not enough no Harshness gives Offence, The Sound must seem an Echo to the Sense. Soft is the Strain when Zephyr gently blows, And the smooth Stream in smoother Numbers flows; But when loud Surges lash the sounding Shore, The hoarse, rough Verse shou'd like the Torrent roar. When Ajax strives, some Rocks' vast Weight to throw, The Line too labours, and the Words move slow; Not so, when swift Camilla scours the Plain, Flies o'er th'unbending Corn, and skims along the Main. Hear how Timotheus' vary'd Lays surprize, And bid Alternate Passions fall and rise! --Alexander Pope, from Essay on Criticism |
18th-Century & Neo-ClassicismThomas Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"
Cleanth Brooks, "Gray's Storied Urn" Samuel Johnson, The Rambler (Selections) Daniel Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year Jonathan Swift, "A Modest Proposal" Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (Selections) Alexander Pope, "Rape of the Lock" Cleanth Brooks, "The Case of Miss Arabell Fermor" Joseph Addison, The Spectator (Selections) Elizabethan Drama:Martin Esslin, An Anatomy of Drama (Excerpt)
William Shakespeare, Macbeth Cleanth Brooks, "The Naked Babe and the Cloak of Manliness" Ed. Janyce Marson, Macbeth: Bloom's Skakespeare Through the Ages (Excerpts) |