Notes: This course will investigate the beginnings and development of what we might call “Literatures in English.” Throughout this survey we will encounter literary works—including Old English lyrics, Middle English narratives, and early modern plays and epics—stemming from the fifth century to the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660. We will explore how our understandings of these texts can be expanded and textured by attention to historical, intellectual, and cultural contexts, as well as by various reading practices. While understanding that these writers inhabited very different circumstances from our own (and attending to the apparent strangeness within many of these works), we will also ask how the likes of William Shakespeare, Margaret Cavendish, John Donne, Julian of Norwich, John Milton, anonymous poets, and others helped to construct ideas that have continued to develop and influence our thought and culture today. How do these texts draw from, structure, and influence concepts of nature? Of gender, race, and class? Of beauty? Of community? In addition to the era’s poems, plays, epics, sonnets, and speculative fiction, we will also include more recent adaptations and reimaginings in discussions where relevant. Assignments include in- and out-of-class writing, quizzes, and a presentation.

Notes: PRE-COLLEGE SECTION