English: British Literature I

Selected texts from the beginnings to the late 18th century. Explores periodization, genre, key terms and concepts through close reading and critical analysis. Fulfills major requirements; open to non-majors.

Open to degree and PACE students

British Lit I covers the period in English literature before 1798, a millennium during which English literature and culture changed so much that these "English" texts were written in four distinct languages. England begins this period as a remote outpost of the crumbling Roman Empire and ends it as a global power that has already lost major colonies in North America. There are dozens of poets, playwrights, and other writers in this period each of whose individual work could be studied for an entire academic career -- or certainly for at least a semester. The course also provides some introduction to the terms, concepts, and methods of the English major, the practices of close reading and careful attention to textual evidence, and the construction of arguments and essays suitable to college-level work in literary studies. If you start the course with minimal experience in this discipline, you should wind up ready to do serious work with difficult texts. In other words, it’s too much to cover: to make the course viable we'll have to pare some things back, be selective, and do a bit to mind the gaps. Still, you should finish the semester with a good orientation to the English literature of several faraway historical periods, and some sustained engagement with a few central texts.

The real effort in this course will be reading seriously, working your way into texts that will feel resistant to you because they were written with very different audiences in mind. To keep an eye on your reading I will probably deploy short quizzes on Brightspace at the opening of some days of class. You'll also be writing about what you read, and discussing it in class.

You can expect short writing assignments, classroom discussion, and quizzes to make up most of your grade, with a medium-length final essay as another significant part of the grade.