We will explore the main stages in the growth of this tradition--Medieval, Renaissance, and Augustan--during the first semester; Romantic, Victorian, and Modern during the second. Readings from these periods will be selected according to two criteria: 1) works that were influential , that later writers admired, imitated and responded to, sometimes reacted against; and 2) works that are representative, that we consider to be especially fine example of their author or period or genre. We will study these works not as bloodless carcasses to dissect nor as grim idols slavishly to adore, but as living words, images, stories, and ideas that moved the people who wrote and read them, that expressed their deepest fears and ideals, which they found beautiful or shocking or profound, which gave meaning to their lives. In the midst of our general overview, then, we will strive to be close, careful, and respectful readers of these poems and prose works, to try to understand them as they themselves were understood in their own time and place. In addition, we will learn to trace formal lines of development from one author to the next and to recognize plot structure, generic conventions, allusions, topoi, verse forms, and rhetorical devices as these were developed from native English or from continental and classical traditions. But perhaps most importantly, our reading of the literature of the past will begin to enable us to feel feelings and think thoughts the existence of which we were perhaps previously unaware.

One of the chief joys of this course is the opportunity it provides to discover authors, periods or genres that can be explored further courses and in one's own personal reading. We trust that students will come to see the English literary tradition both in its continuity and in its originality, not as a narrow selection of approved texts but as a rich and potent source of new images, new forms, new insights, fresh and striking eloquence, and dramatic new ways of looking at the world.

The syllabus for the fall term will include readings in the Old English epic poem Beowulf, Chaucer, Spenser, Renaissance sonnets, early 17th-century poetry, Milton, Pope, Swift, and Johnson.

Requirements: class participation, short essays, a midterm and final exam.
Texts:
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th edition, Vol. 1
Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form
M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms

Enrollment limited to 20 students per section.