Description

The primary goal of this course is to develop our own and one another’s powers of observation, analysis and clear, precise, persuasive writing. In our discussions and essays we’ll focus on the British literary tradition from the dawn of modern English to the mid-twentieth century. Students will learn about how the language itself took shape, the myriad poetic forms and devices different writers have employed as well as the peculiar conventions of Elizabethan drama and the novels that, during the Industrial Revolution, helped to give rise to the first reading public. We’ll also study some of the ways formerly colonized peoples have reimagined those same literary texts and conventions. But throughout these explorations we will pay particularly close attention to the nuts and bolts of English grammar and sentence structure and to the techniques of close reading and marshaling textual evidence to support an argument.

Texts 

Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice. New York: Penguin Books, 2002

Aimé Césaire, A Tempest: Based on Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’: Adaptation for the Black Theater. Richard Miller, trans. New York: Theater Communications Group, 2002.

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Selected Canterbury Tales: A New Verse Translation. Sheila Fisher, trans. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012.

Maria Franziska Fahey. A Guide to Reading Shakespeare’s The Tempest. New York: Accabonac Press, 2013.

Camille Guthrie, Poetry Handbook. New York: Friends Seminary, 2004-2005

George Orwell. “Shooting an Elephant,” “The Politics of the English Language,” and other selected essays (handouts)

William Shakespeare, The Tempest. Burton Raffell, ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006.

Jonathan Swift. A Modest Proposal (handout)

George Yule, “Language history and change” in The Study of Language: An Introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985 (handout)