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Syllabus, Fall 2008
Essay Exams
Exam #1
Essay Topics
Exam #2
Essay Topics
Exam #3 Essay
Topics
PowerPoint lectures
The Origins of English Literature
The English Renaissance
The
Restoration and Eighteenth-Century
Useful Web Links
Medieval Literature
Old
English Literature
Beowulf
Chaucer
Medieval drama
York
cycle
York
simulation
Renaissance Era
World Shakespeare Bibliography
General Resources
Norton Topics
Online
Literary Resources on the Net
Marxist Theory Resources
Marxist Theory Quick-Start
Marxist Internet
Archive
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This course provides an overview of
important canonical works, authors, concepts, and literary terminology
relevant to the study of British literature from the "Old English" era
through the Enlightenment. Major emphasis will be placed on Chaucer,
Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton.
The principal critical approach
is dialectical (i.e., Marxist), for which our guiding thought is expressed in the
following quotation from Fredric Jameson in his classic theoretical study
Marxism and Form:
“The works of culture come to us as signs in an
all-but-forgotten code, as symptoms of diseases no longer even
recognized as such, as fragments of a totality we have long since lost
the organs to see.”
The course is presented in
lecture format. The final grade is determined by a class
curve based upon the
cumulative numerical scores of three exams and six quizzes.
*******
Current Announcements:
No class on Monday, 24 November. Instead,
please complete the special
Extra Credit
assignment.
Final Exam: Monday, 15 December 2008.
11:00-1:00.
.Please read the following
short statement by Raymond Williams concerning the construction of a
syllabus.
Teaser: "And yet immediately you look at a syllabus you
see that the limits are in fact inscribed in it, and this is the most
difficult professional point. For a syllabus is always offered as if it
were a fairly common-sense, self-evident description of what is agreed
common ground in the study of the subject -- English Literature. It is
not offered as a matter for argument but rather as the way the subject
as it were constructs itself."
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