Syllabus
1) The English Renaissance, Elizabethan sonnets
2) Renaissance drama: William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
3) Shakespeare. Seventeenth-century English poetry (John Donne), selected passages from John Milton’s Paradise Lost
4) The rise of the English novel: Swift, Defoe, Fielding, Sterne. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice
5) The English Romantics: Blake, the Lake poets, Keats, Shelley, Byron (William Blake, ‘The Chimney Sweeper’, William Wordsworth, ‘Tintern Abbey’, John Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’)
6) Victorian novelists: Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (W. M. Thackeray, the Brontë sisters, George Eliot)
7) Late Victorian and Edwardian authors: Thomas Hardy, George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
8) Modernism: D. H. Lawrence, ‘The Shadow in the Rose Garden’ (short story)
9) Modernism: T. S. Eliot (Canto I from The Waste Land), Virginia Wolf, ‘The Mark on the Wall’ (short story), James Joyce, ‘Eveline’ (short story)
10) Modernism and its alternatives: E. M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, ‘Shooting an Elephant’ (essay) (from ‘Politics and the English Language’ and ‘The Prevention of Literature’)
11) Post-war literature: Graham Greene, William Golding, Lord of the Flies. Angry young men: Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim
12) Contemporary Nobel prize-winning authors: Seamus Heaney (Irish poet), Herald Pinter (playwright), British novelists: V. S. Naipaul, Doris Lessing, ‘To Room Nineteen’ (short story), Kazuo Ishiguro, ‘A Family Supper’ (short story). The young Irish millennial novelist Sally Rooney (extracts from the novel Normal People).
Annotation
This course is primarily intended for students of Translation Studies. (The capacity of 25 people will be adjusted according to the actual number of students in their third year.) It aims to introduce them to British literature through a variety of texts. These include influential works by British authors from the Renaissance to the present. The main focus is on close reading of individual poems, scenes from plays, chapters from novels and short stories. Students will be required to read and prepare the appropriate texts prior to attending the class. They will be provided with handouts and brief presentations supplying cultural and literary contexts, but will also be expected to read relevant passages in critical literature and histories of English literature. Our literary analysis will be stylistic in the first place, but we shall also explore the potential for interpretations that the texts offer. Though we shall mostly analyse short stories and extracts from longer works, we shall rely on everyone’s knowledge of the set novels and plays. A short list of these can be found in the ‘Literature’ section (see below). (All of them are well known, so students may already be familiar with them.)
CREDIT REQUIREMENTS:
Attendance based on active participation in seminar discussions is essential and amounts to 40 per cent of the total requirements. You will also be expected to prove your knowledge of literary contexts by passing a short test (20 per cent) and discussing your reading with the teacher (40 per cent). The compulsory reading list consisting of the set texts for the seminars, plus a few other novels, plays and short stories, is included below and posted on the MOODLE web site.