This purpose of this course is to explore the relationship between literature and its cultural and historical contexts with the methodological premise that literature both reflects and helps to shape the culture in which it is written.  Focused on the relationship between literature and history after the eighteenth century, this course will explore the formulation and development of the post-Enlightenment subject.  How we might ask, did the notion of this kind of “individual” as a social, political, cultural, and economic subject get articulated and evolve over time?  After the political and philosophical upheavals of the post-Enlightenment era, England and America began to define simultaneously connected and different identities while also engaging in a more self-conscious literary and philosophical dialogue. Versions of this course may subsequently explore Romantic engagement with the emergence of these identities in an increasingly secular, industrial, and multicultural world with such authors as William Blake, William Godwin, William Wordsworth, Maria Edgeworth, Mary and Percy Shelley, Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Christina Rossetti in Britain and Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Emily Dickinson in America.  These courses may also explore how artists made a radical break with nineteenth-century traditions by investigating the innovative strategies of artists like T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner, who represented modern consciousness and subjectivity through stylistic dislocation and fragmentation.  Other topics in this class may examine later twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century writers such as Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison, Derek Walcott, and Zadie Smith, who complicated these modernist innovations by exploring the human condition in an age characterized by the rise of mass and visual culture, the threat of atomic destruction, the disintegration of colonial empires, increasingly pressing issues of ethnic and national identity, and the rise of terrorism and global conflict. Not open to students who have received credit for ENGL 282 or ENGL 283 unless permission granted by the department chair. This course satisfies the Core Curriculum requirement in the Arts. Prerequisite or co-requisites: English 102, CORE 101, or CORE 301.

The purpose of this course is to explore the relationship between literature and its cultural and historical contexts with the methodological premise that literature both reflects and helps to shape the culture in which it is written.  How do literary texts grapple with and even intervene in central political, religious, and cultural questions and debates? How are prevailing cultural values and beliefs embedded in and challenged by literature? While attending to questions of genre, authorship, and historical and cultural context, the course may consist of selected readings of early Western literature chosen from its beginnings in the Homeric epics, Greek tragedies, and the Hebrew Testament; through major works of Christian culture in the Middle Ages, such as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Dante’s Divine Comedy; to the revival of classical learning in the Renaissance, embodied in the work of such authors as William Shakespeare and John Milton; through authors of the Enlightenment including Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and Benjamin Franklin.  The course may examine classical and Biblical works in translation, as well as works originally written in English. Always, however, this course will explore something of what early literature in the West tells us about changing notions of the spiritual and the material, of the relationship between self and society, of heroism, faith, love and redemption—and the relationship of these ideals to our world today. Different topics include “Troy through Time”; “Britain’s Greatest Hits, from Beowulf to Gulliver’s Travels”; “Epic Journeys: Middle Ages to the Renaissance”; and “Authors and Authority from the Middle Ages through the Protestant Reformation.” Formerly ENGL 281; not open to students who have received credit for ENGL 281 unless permission granted by the department chair. This course satisfies the Core Curriculum requirement in the Arts. Prerequisites or co-requisites: English 102, CORE 101, or CORE 301.