Examples of Honors College Literature Classes

We will read foundational works from three different ancient cultures: Greece, China, and Israel. We will pay particular attention to the question of the kinds of values that these foundational works were meant to instill in their ancient audiences. What, for each culture, constitutes the exemplary person? In particular, what does each work have to say about the nature of heroism, war, and peace?

Emphasis will be on close and attentive reading of the texts. Literature, during this period, was meant to be taken in by the ear rather than the eye, and we will emphasize the oral/aural dimension of these works. We will read the whole of Robert Fitzgerald's translation of the Iliad, which is written in a supple blank verse that is the rough equivalent of Homer's dactylic hexameter line. Blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) is the metrical form that arose, in sixteenth-century England, as a way to translate ancient epic verse (specifically Virgil's dactylic hexameter) into English. Blank verse is the medium in which Shakespeare wrote his plays and Milton his great poem epic poem, Paradise Lost. Students will train their ears to hear and scan ancient verse, even if (as is supposed) they do not know the ancient languages (Greek, Chinese, Hebrew) themselves; and to hear modern attempts at approximating the aural effects of ancient poetry and prose.

By what do you order your life? What is the guiding interest or principle around which you organize everything else? Different centuries have come up with different answers. Passionate love for a woman is one center or order; the code of Honor is another; religious beliefs and heroism are yet more. We will be studying primarily drama, but the texts will cover from the Middle Ages to the mid 18th century. The works we study will include: Tirso, Burlador de Sevilla (Spain); Aphra Behn, The Rover (Part 1); Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1; Marlowe, Dr. Faustus; Goldsmith She Stoops to Conquer (all from England); Corneille, Le Cid; Molière, Tartuffe (both from France). Other non-dramatic texts include Malory's Mort D'Arthur and (from China), The Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee (includes a play-ette in the middle of the novel) and poetry from the Renaissance by Petrarch, Wyatt, Sidney, Queen Elizabeth I, Katherine Philipps, Louise Labé, (and modern) sonneteer Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Class will require two medium length critical papers, for one of which a literary journal kept all term will substitute. No midterm but an essay final in class. Play scenes by volunteering members of the class will be part of the instruction and will gain extra credit, as well the same sort of "Adventurous topics" which require outside research. The class will also feature lecture broken up by questions, as well as small and large group discussion.

This third term of Honors College Literature requires attentive reading of both primary texts and literary criticism; it also requires, at the end of the term, the production of an original research paper. To meet the course's goals we will divide our reading of primary texts and their secondary criticism among four literary-critical modes from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries:

• the novel as genre
• the advent of modernism
• the colonial impulse and post-colonial critique
• post-modernism

After reading a nineteenth-century novel (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein), we will approach modernism through poetry (T.S. Eliot) and novel (Virginia Wolfe's Orlando), then move to Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things to assess colonialism and post-colonialism. We will conclude with Tom Stoppard's Arcadia to define post-modernism and analyze its play (in both senses of the word) with prior eras' literary concerns.

Requirements will include response papers, article summaries, annotated bibliographies, a class presentation, and a term paper.

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