Course Description: Designed for college-level students, this English Lit & Comp class presents prose, dramatic works, and poetry from various periods, disciplines, and rhetorical contexts.  In the search for the author's motive, drive, and purpose, the intended audience, and the chosen subject matter, students develop stylistic flexibility and compositional techniques. 

Class Expectations: Students will keep a reading journal throughout the semester.  Daily readings, discussions, weekly writing assignments, weekly tests, mid-term and final exams, and final oral report requirements are listed on the Syllabus.  Understanding and analyzing challenging literature, writing responses to literature both analytically and creatively will be a focus.

Grades: Daily reading journal 5% (checked every other Friday), daily discussions 5%, weekly tests 5%, writing assisgnments 10%, mid-term and final essay exams 25% each, and final oral reports 25%.  Tests are given at the end of each week to evaluate the understanding of the literature.  Only the final grade is final.

                     Textbook: The Language of Literature by McDougall Littell

Students will receive examples of past AP tests to help prepare them to take the AP Literature and Composition Exam in May.

Index of Helpful Links:    Writings of Ancient Greece & Medieval English

Comp & Lit Sites:

MIT OpenCourseWare:

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/courses/courses/index.htm#WritingandHumanisticStudies

AP English

Literary Visions

Merriam-Webster

On-Line English Grammar

Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr.

Week One:   Overview of Early Literature of Ancient Greece

The Odyssey by Homer 
The Iliad by Homer
                           

Netscape: Online Newhour Forum: Odyssey

Women in Homer's Odyssey

Research:  Review the chronology of  known writers from ancient Greece.

http://ancienthistory.about.com/cs/greecehellas1/a/bltimegkwriters.htm

Write:  Discuss the creativity, imagination and intelligence of Homer's works

Week Two: Overview of Dramatic Works of Ancient Greece

• Iphigenia at Aulis by Euripedes
• Oedipus the King first performed in 428 B.C. by Sophocles
• Lysistrata written in 411 B.C. by Aristophanes.

Writing Assignment:  Compare & Contrast the fictional works of Homer with that of the stage dramatists.

Week Three:  An Overview of Literary Movements in English
                           Language

Medieval - Old & Middle Eng (40)
Victorianism - Victorian (7) 
Lost Generation (5) 
Turn of Century 
Lake Poets (2) 
Transcendentalism (3) 
Irish Renaissance (5) 
Surrealism (1) 
Harlem Renaissance (10) 
Romanticism - Romantic (18)
Gothic (3) 
Restoration (8) 
Existentialism (4) 
Renaissance (5) 
Enlightenment (2) 
Realism (7) 
DaDaism (2) 
Puritanism (3) 
Colonialism - Colonial Lit. (9) 
Naturalism (4) 
Classical Literature (1)
Modernism (16) 
Cavalier poets (5) 
Metaphysical Poets (6) 
Bloomsbury Group (8)
 

Week Four:  The Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Periods 449-1485
                           
                           Fiction

• Beowulf translated by Burton Raffel
• The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
• The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
•  Le Morte d'Arthur (including the Preface to the First Edition)
• The Book of Margery Kempe by Margery Kempe

Poetry by anonymous authors:
                           

• Exeter Book
• The Seafarer
• The Wife's Lament
• Barbara Allan
• Sir Patrick Spens
• Get Up and Bar the Door

Writings

• First Hand and Expressive Writing

Skill builders

• Generalizing, writing an introduction, using quotation marks

Return to Index

Week Five:  The Poetry of the English Renaissance 1485-1660
                           

• My Lute, Awake! by Sir Thomas Wyatt
• On Monsieur's Departure by Elizabeth I
• Sonnet 30 and Sonnet 75 by Edmund Spenser
• The Passionate Shepherd to His Love by Christopher Marlowe
• The Nymphs Reply to the Shepherd
• Sonnet 29, Sonnet 116, and Sonnet 130 by William Shakespeare
• Sonnet 169 and Sonnet 292 by Francesco Petrarch
• A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning and Holy Sonnet 10 by John Donne
• To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell
• On My First Son and Still to Be Neat by Ben Jonson
• How Soon Hath Time and When I Consider How My Light Is Spent by John Milton
• from the Rubáiyát by Omar Khayyám

Writing about literature: the creative response and poetic license 

Week Six:  Essays of the English Renaissance 1485-1660

• From Essays: Of Studies and Of Marriage and Single Life by Sir Frances Bacon
• from Meditation 17 by John Donne
• Female Orations by Margaret Cavendish

Narrative and literary writing

Week Seven:  Stage Dramas of the English Renaissance 1485-1660

• Macbeth, Hamlet, and Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare

Writings

• Writing a character sketch

Skill builders

• Degrees of comparison, avoiding cliches, generating information about a character, avoiding double comparisons, formulating analogies, using personification, using capitalization and punctuation in poetry

Return to Index

Week Eight: The Restoration and Enlightenment
                           
                           Fiction

• The Acorn and the Pumpkin and The Value of Knowledge by Jean de La Fontaine

Poetry 

• from An Essay on Man and Epigrams by Alexander Pope
• Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray
• Thirty-Eight by Charlotte Smith

Nonfiction

• from The Diary of Samuel Pepys by Samuel Pepys
• Letter to Her daughter by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
• from An Academy of Women by Daniel Defoe
• A Modest A Proposal by Jonathan Swift
• On Spring and On Idleness by Samuel Johnson
• from The Diary and Letters of Madame d'Arblay

Novels

• Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

Writings

• A satirical essay
• Informative Exposition

Skill
                           builders

• Complex sentences, using hyperbole, identifying your audience, using subordinate conjunctions, drawing conclusions, using a variety of modes, using active voice

Return to Index

Week Nine: The Flowering of Romanticism 1798-1832
                           
                           Poetry

• The Lamb, The Little Boy Lost, The Little Boy Found, The Tyger, The Fly, and The Sick Rose by William Blake
• Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, It is a Beauteous Evening, and I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth
• Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• She Walks in Beauty, When We Two Parted by George Gordon, Lord Byron
• Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, and To a skylark by Percy Bysshe Shelley
• Ode on a Grecian Urn;To Autumn; Bright Star, Would I Were Steadfast as Thou Art, and When I have Fears that I May Cease to Be by John Keats
• The Lotus-Blossom Cowers by Henrich Heine

Writings

• Writing an Analysis
• Writing a Process Response

Skill builders

• Dangling modifiers, identifying denotation and connotations of words, using sensory details, writing a conclusion, avoiding misplaced modifiers, classifying information, comparing and contrasting, using comparisons

Return to Index

Week Ten: The Victorians 1832-1901
                           
                           Fiction

• The Miracle of Purun Bhagat by Rudyard Kipling
• What Men Live By by Leo Tolstoy
• The King is Dead, Long live the King by Mary Coleridge

Poetry

• From In Memoriam by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• My Last Duchess and Porphyria's Lover by Robert Browning
• Sonnet 43 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• Dover Beach and To Marguerite&emdash;Continued by Matthew Arnold
• Pied Beauty and Spring and Fall: To a Young Child by Gerard Manley Hopkins
• The Man He Killed and Ah, Are you Digging on My Grave by Thomas Hardy
• When I was One-and-Twenty and To an Athlete Dying Young by A.E. Housman
• 1996 by Rabindranath Tagore

Nonfiction

• A Warning Against Passion by Charlotte Brontë
• from Journal by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Drama

• The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

Novels

• Wuthering Heights by Charlotte Brontë
• A review of works by the Brontë sisters

Writings

• Writing a Persuasive Essay
• Writing a Criticism

Skill
                           builders

• Adjective clauses, using compound verbs, achieving unity within paragraphs, using relative pronouns, evaluating arguments, elaborating with visuals, using quotations

Return to Index

Week Eleven: Emerging Modernism 1901-1950
                           
                           Fiction

• The Kit-Bag by Algernon Blackwood
• The Infant Prodigy by Thomas Mann
• The Truth about George P.G. Wodehouse
• The Duchess and the Jeweller by Virginia Woolf
• Tobermory by Saki
• The Demon Lover by Elizabeth Bowen
• The Rocking Horse Winner by D. H. Lawrence
• James Joyce by Araby
• A Cup of Tea by Katherine Mansfield

Poetry

• What I Expected by Stephen Spender
• An Irish Airman Foresees His Death by William Butler Yeats
• The Soldier by Rupert Brooke
• Dreamers by Siegfried Sasson
• To My Mother by George Barker
• The Second Coming and Sailing to Byzantium by William Butler Yeats
• Preludes by T. S. Eliot
• Musée des Beaux Arts and The Unknown Citizen by W. H. Auden
• Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night and In My Craft or Sullen Art by Dylan Thomas
• Writing/Escritura by Octavio Paz

Nonfiction

• from Virginia Woolf by E.M. Forster
• from Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain
• from The Speeches, May 19, 1940 by Winston Churchill
• Words and Behavior by Aldous Huxley
• A Hanging by George Orwell

Drama

• The Rising of the Moon by Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory
• Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw

Novel

• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Writings

• Writing Criticism
• Writing a fictional story using suspense
• Writing a report

Skill
                           builders

• Compound-complex sentences, varying sentence openers, setting criteria, avoiding phrase and clause fragments, outlining, citing sources, punctuating quotations

Return to Index

Week Twelve: Contemporary Voices 1950-Present
                           
                           Fiction

• At the Pitt-rivers by Penelope Lively
• Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother
• A Sunrise on the Veld by Doris Lessing
• The Distant Past by William Trevor
• Civil Peace by Chinua Achebe
• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
• Six Feet of the Country
• The First Year of My Life by Muriel Spark
• The Happy Man by Naguib Mahfouz
• Paintbox Place by Ruth Rendell

Poetry

• Digging by Seamus Heaney
• The Horses by Ted Hughes
• In Music by Czeslaw Milosz
• Telephone Conversation by Wole Syinka

Nonfiction

• We'll Never Conquer Space by Arthur C. Clarke
• from Writing as an Act of Hope by Isabel Allende

Drama

• That's All by Harold Pinter

Novels

• I Am One of You Forever by Fred Chappell
• Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

Writings

• Writing an Analysis
• Writing a Persuasive Essay

Skill builders

• Adverb clauses, using compound prepositions, using transitional words, using elliptical clauses, conducting surveys, using facts and statistics, organizing with adverbs and adverb phrases

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