Survey of English Literature Part I (From Beowulf to Sheridan) and Part II (Anglo-American Literature from Pope to Beckett)
An introduction to major works of literature in English, all of which are of undisputed classics of literary, historical, and contemporary value, affording us fresh perspectives on the past and the present. In this course, we will read excerpts and major short works of poetry, drama, and narrative by such authors as the Beowulf poet, Chaucer, The Sir Gawain poet, Wyatt, Surrey, Spencer, Sydney, Ben Jonson, Sir Thomas More, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Herrick, Donne, Herbert, Marvell, Milton, Dryden, Congreve, Sheridan, Pope, Swift, and Defoe. In the spring, we will focus on such authors as Samuel Johnson, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, De Quincey, Shelley, Keats, Austen, Carlyle, Mill, Tennyson, R. and E.B. Browning, C. and E. Bronte, Poe, Melville, Dickens, D.G. and C. Rossetti, Pater, Ruskin, Hardy, Hopkins, Whitman, Dickinson, Wilde, Kipling, Conrad, Yeats, Shaw, Woolf, Joyce, Williams, Eliot, McKay, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Auden and Beckett. We will also examine the advantages and limitations of important critical perspectives in aiding our understanding of these works, perhaps including formalism, Freudianism, feminism, Marxism, deconstruction, and New Historicism.