Group I (Writing and the Teaching of Writing)
Group II (English Literature through the Seventeenth Century)
Group III (English Literature since the Seventeenth Century)
Group IV (American Literature)
SUMMER 2008 COURSES
Group I
There are no Group I courses at Oxford in summer 2008.
Group II (English Literature through the Seventeenth Century)
7907 Chaucer and His Literary Environment/Mr. Perkins
The focus of this course will be some of the most engaging and troubling works by Geoffrey Chaucer, including The Canterbury Tales, The Legend of Good Women, and Troilus and Criseyde, his greatest single achievement. We will approach Chaucer not as an isolated genius in an otherwise dark medieval world, but as a lively participant in a number of social and literary debates and traditions, reading selected texts by his predecessors, contemporaries, and his earliest readers. We’ll ask how Chaucer’s work is distinctive, and how other writers responded to his sometimes provocative narratives about religion, social class, men and women, and the very idea of “English” literature.
Texts: The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Houghton Mifflin or, more cheaply, Oxford paperback), especially The Canterbury Tales, The Legend of Good Women, Troilus and Criseyde, The Parliament of Fowls; Ovid, Metamorphoses, Books 1, 2, and 6, trans. A.D. Melville (Oxford World’s Classics); Virgil, The Aeneid, Books 2-4, trans. C. Day Lewis (Oxford World’s Classics); Women Defamed and Women Defended, ed. Alcuin Blamires (Clarendon); Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. P.G Walsh (Oxford World’s Classics); Robert Henryson, Fables and The Testament of Cresseid in The Makars, ed. J.A. Tassioulas (Canongate).
7908 The Margins of Medieval Literature/Mr. Perkins
This course explores the figures who lurk at the edges of medieval stories and manuscripts, often threatening to destabilize the chivalric or religious narratives from which they have been excluded. Monstrous knights, ghosts, those maddened by love or violence, unbelievers, peasants and women all give a vital yet unsettling perspective on medieval texts, both familiar and less well known. We shall also consider the way in which the Middle Ages itself has been reimagined, especially by the Victorians, as a period on the edge of reason and history.
Texts: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. A.C. Cawley and J.J. Anderson (Everyman) or you could read translations by J.R.R. Tolkien, Simon Armitage, or Bernard O’Donoghue; The Awntyrs off Arthur (available at http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/awnfrm.htm); Chaucer, The Book of the Duchess and, from The Canterbury Tales, the tales of the Knight, Miller, Reeve, Cook, Wife of Bath and Prioress in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Houghton Mifflin or Oxford paperback); Sir Orfeo (available at http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/orfeofrm.htm); The York Plays, ed. R. Beadle and P. King (Oxford); Folie Tristan in The Birth of Romance, trans. J. Weiss (Everyman); Thomas Malory, Balin and, from The Book of Sir Tristram, “Isode the Fair,” “Tristram’s Madness and Exile,” and “Launcelot and Elaine,” all in Malory: Works, ed. E. Vinaver (Oxford); Alfred Tennyson, The Lady of Shalott, Morte d’Arthur, The Idylls of the King (especially “Balin and Balan,” "Merlin and Vivien," “Lancelot and Elaine,” and “The Passing of Arthur”), read in any edition available to you.
7911 English Renaissance Lyric Poetry, 1580-1650/Mr. West
The period 1580-1650 witnessed the rebirth of English lyric poetry and with it an explosion of views about the proper forms, styles and occasions of writing. This course focuses on the achievements of some key innovators and exponents: Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, John Donne, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell. Close reading of individual poems will go hand-in-hand with discussion of such key aesthetic and historical contexts as: the rise of English as a literary language; the emergence of different views of the poet's function (prophet, courtier, wit, priest); the social uses of poetry in patronage relationships and coteries; print and manuscript culture; the development of devotional poetry and poetics; and the importance of song and oral performance. Several sessions will involve comparisons with early modern music, architecture, painting, and landscape.
Texts: Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford World's Classics); Edmund Spenser: The Shorter Poems, ed. Richard McCabe (Penguin); Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (Penguin); John Donne: The Major Works, ed. John Carey (Oxford World's Classics); George Herbert: The Complete English Poems, ed. John Tobin (Penguin); Andrew Marvell: The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (Penguin).
7920 Shakespeare: On the Page and on the Stage/Ms. Gilbert
A play text exists on the page; a performance text exists on stage. These two versions of Shakespeare’s texts (to which we may add performances on film and video) will form the center of our work as we read and discuss play texts, and then see ten productions, some by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, and some in London (at the restored Globe and at Regent’s Park). Some classes will take place in Stratford, and it is hoped that these will include meetings with members of the RSC, who will discuss their work in the productions. Given the traveling required for each production, the number of pre- and post-show discussions, as well as the extra sessions with stage professionals, the course needs to meet at least three days a week and requires energetic participation and stamina. Writing for the course includes preparing questions for discussion, and probably four short papers dealing with issues of text and performance. Plays already booked in Stratford are: The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, and Hamlet; more information on the plays to be seen will be circulated to those enrolling in the course as soon as it is available. Students must expect additional charges for tickets and transportation of $750.
Texts: Plays of the repertory in reliable editions (either a Complete Works or individual paperbacks, particularly from Arden, Oxford, New Cambridge or New Penguin). A list of selected readings on Shakespeare in the theater and the final list of productions will be sent to students prior to the start of the session. Students should expect to read all plays ahead of time, and then again during the course.
7931 Early Modern Tragedy/Ms. Smith
Why did tragedy give the Elizabethans and Jacobeans such pleasure? What was it about Thomas Kyd’s play The Spanish Tragedy that made it so indispensable to early modern culture—a reference point as iconic as the shower scene in Psycho? In reading a range of tragedies from the period 1590-1620, we will think about genre, history, and theatrical pleasure; about tragedy’s intersections with politics, with religion, and with dramatic action; and about the perverse attractions of violent entertainment. Early modern tragedy’s obsessions with death, with subjectivity, and with sexuality make it at once historically specific and uncannily modern: using a range of interpretive lenses we’ll try to get to grips with this interplay. Reading Shakespearean texts alongside the plays of his influences, contemporaries, and rivals resituates some familiar material in a different context. One of the players in Tom Stoppard’s sharp and witty Hamlet play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, identifies "blood, sex and rhetoric" as the crucial components of Renaissance theatrical popularity: an interest in at least two of these is the only prerequisite of this course.
Texts: William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus; Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy; Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus; Anon, Arden of Faversham; Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra; Thomas Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy; John Webster, The White Devil; John Ford, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Any edition will do; many of these plays are in English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology, ed. David Bevington et al., or in Renaissance Drama: An Anthology of Plays and Entertainments, ed. Arthur Kinney (Blackwell). Other reading will be provided during the course.
7935 Literature and the Arts in Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century England/Mr. McCullough
This course will set the major literary achievements of Restoration and Augustan England in the wider contexts of politics, religion, and the other arts that flourished after the return of monarchy in 1660. We will consider major published poets and dramatists, as well as manuscript culture, diaries, and the emergent periodical essay. An emphasis will be placed on parallel features and influences in architecture, garden design, urban development, painting, and music, taking advantage (through field trips, for which students should allow a small budget of up to £100 for travel) of the architectural, landscape, and fine art legacies in Oxford and London. (This course will satisfy one Group II and one Group III requirement.)
Texts: John Milton, Paradise Lost (either Oxford World's Classics or Penguin); Restoration Literature: An Anthology, ed. Paul Hammond (Oxford World's Classics); Eighteenth-Century Poetry, An Annotated Anthology, ed. David Fairer and Christine Gerrard (Blackwell). Plays: Sir George Etherege, The Man of Mode; Nathaniel Lee, Lucius Junius Brutus; Thomas Otway, Venice Preserv'd (these are all found in Restoration Drama, An Anthology, ed. David Womersley, Blackwell, in paperback, but you are welcome to use any other editions you might find; the Lee will be difficult to find outside of this anthology or libraries).
7938 Milton and the Literature of the English Revolution/Mr. West
This course explores Milton's poetry and prose in the context of contemporary literature and polemical writing of the English Revolution; its aim is to enrich understanding of his achievements not only as a lyric and epic poet, but also as a thinker and controversialist. Works studied in detail include the early Poems (1645), Milton's polemical prose of the 1640s, Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, and Paradise Regained. As well as detailed study of key texts, we will also consider how Milton's poetry and politics were shaped by the writings of those he admired or opposed, whether canonical poets such as Spenser, Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson, or less well known radical and Royalist writers of the 1640s.
Text: John Milton, The Major Works, ed. Jonathan Goldberg and Stephen Orgel (Oxford). Copies of some out-of-print or otherwise unavailable material will be distributed in Oxford.
Group III (English Literature since the Seventeenth Century)
7935 Literature and the Arts in Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century England/Mr. McCullough
(See the description under Group II offerings. This course will satisfy one Group II and one Group III requirement.)
7941 Early Romanticism/Ms. Gerrard
This course will chart the evolution of romanticism by locating its origins in earlier eighteenth-century writing and by examining a number of key texts from the “first generation” of romantic writers of the 1790s and early 1800s. The course will explore early romanticism from a variety of perspectives—political, social, literary, aesthetic. We will focus in particular on the following topics: sensibility and sentiment, the sublime, landscapes of the mind, rudeness and primitivism, the role of women. The list of texts below is not comprehensive. Students will be encouraged to pursue individual lines of enquiry and to read widely for their written papers.
Texts: Anne Finch, "A Nocturnal Reverie" (1713); Alexander Pope, "Eloisa to Abelard" (1717); Thomas Parnell, "A Night-Piece on Death" (1721); James Thomson, "Spring" (1730); Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard (1751); Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village (1770); Anna Laetitia Barbauld, A Summer Evening’s Meditation (1773); William Cowper, The Task (1785). All of the preceding poems are anthologized in Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, 2nd ed., ed. D. Fairer and C. Gerrard (Blackwell). William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (1798); Wordsworth, the two-part Prelude (1799); Coleridge, “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” “Frost at Midnight,” “Kubla Khan”; William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789-93). The most convenient source for Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Blake is Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu (Blackwell). Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811); Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1817), both Oxford World’s Classics.
7945 British Romantics against Romanticism/Mr. Brice
This course will examine some of the principal works of those British writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who have come to be called the '"Romantics." The main aim of the course will be to explore the sheer diversity of themes, forms, and contexts within some of the major canonical poems by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and Byron. We will aim to define what makes each of these writers' work unique, and to test the value of any generalizing vision of their collective work.
Texts: We will look at the following poems in detail: William Wordsworth, "Michael" in either Lyrical Ballads, ed. S. Mason (Longman) or Lyrical Ballads (Routledge) (whichever is cheaper or more easily obtainable), "The Prelude (1799)," "The Prelude (1805)," Books 9 to 11, in The Prelude: The Four Texts, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (Norton); Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Frost at Midnight," "France: An Ode," "Fears in Solitude" in Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Major Works, ed. H.J. Jackson (Oxford); John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Hyperion: a Fragment," "The Fall of Hyperion" in John Keats: Selected Poems, ed. John Barnard (Penguin); Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Julian and Maddalo," "Adonais," "The Triumph of Life" in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. D.H. Reiman and N. Fraistat (Norton); Lord Byron, "Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: a Romaunt" (III and IV), "Don Juan" in Lord Byron: The Major Works, ed. Jerome McGann (Oxford).
7950 Atlantic Crossings: Anglo-American Literary Relations, 1798–1900/Ms. Gerrard
This course aims to explore the cross-currents of British and American literary culture of the nineteenth century. By looking at key texts across a wide variety of genres and modes, including romance, the gothic, realism and naturalism, we will examine the sometimes tense and competitive relationship between American authors and British cultural models. We will explore a variety of themes such as American innocence and European "sophistication"; landscape and nature; history; self-reliance and community; sin, guilt and the "double self." We will conduct seminars around key pairings or groupings of pivotal British and American texts, supplemented by other contemporary materials. (This cross-listed course carries one unit of Group III credit and one unit of Group IV credit.)
Texts: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Ryme of the Ancient Mariner (1798); Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851); William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1799); Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself " from Leaves of Grass (1850); Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818); Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly (1799); Edgar Allan Poe, Selected Tales (1837), especially "William Wilson" and "The Fall of the House of Usher"; William Wordsworth, "The Thorn"; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter; George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860); Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905). Most of these texts are readily available in Oxford World’s Classics editions. There is an Easy Read edition of Edgar Huntley, ed. Philip Barnard (2007).
7970 Pre-Raphaelitism to Decadence: Literature and Vision/Mr. Evangelista
The Victorian art critic John Ruskin once thundered that "Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion—all in one." This course explores the intersections, borrowings, and clashes of verbal and visual cultures in Victorian Britain, from the birth of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in the mid-century to the Decadence of the 1890s. We will discuss issues such as the place and value of art in the second half of the nineteenth century, pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting, aestheticism, art for art’s sake, ekphrasis, ghostly visions, sexuality, Symbolism, Decadent writing. Our focus in class will be primarily on literary texts, but there will be opportunities for integrating visual material and for exploring Oxford’s superb late-Victorian heritage. A course pack with additional reading will be given out at the beginning of the course.
Texts: John Ruskin, Selected Writings (Oxford World’s Classics); D.G. Rossetti, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Jerome McGann (Yale); Walter Pater, The Renaissance (Oxford World’s Classics); A.C. Swinburne, Poems and Ballads and Atalanta in Calydon, ed. Kenneth Haynes (Penguin); Henry James, Roderick Hudson (any edition) and The Aspern Papers and Other Stories (Oxford World’s Classics); Vernon Lee, Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales (Broadview); Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Salomé (any edition).
7974 Ghost Stories/Ms. Smith
If, as W.H. Auden suggested, art is "the means by which we break bread with the dead," literature is intrinsically ghostly. Like ghosts, literature makes connections between the living and the dead: it too can haunt us with an image or a feeling; both question the mundane and material reality in which we think we live; neither is susceptible to real explication. The literary and the ghostly both unsettle us, and it’s the aim of this course to preserve that spookiness while trying to understand it. Using a range of literary texts which could be called ghost stories, we will investigate the hold of this particular genre across the imaginations of centuries of readers, but in considering ghost stories we will also be approaching some fundamental questions about literature itself. We will discuss the historical circumstances from which these individual works were imagined, but also analyze recurrent motifs and tropes. From Hamlet to the film The Sixth Sense, from The Turn of the Screw to Beloved, ghost stories can be contextualized via psychoanalysis, politics, anthropology, theology, history, and urban myth: we’ll try to sample some of this thrilling interdisciplinary range.
Texts: William Shakespeare, Hamlet (any edition); Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (Oxford World’s Classics); M.R. James, Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories (Oxford World’s Classics); Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (any edition); Susan Hill, The Woman in Black (U.S. ed.: David Godine; U.K. ed.: Viking); Toni Morrison, Beloved (Plume); The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories, ed. Michael Cox and R.A Gilbert (Oxford). Other reading will be provided during the course.
7975 James Joyce/Ms. Johnson
Students will engage in intensive study of Ulysses in its Hiberno-European, modernist, and Joycean contexts. We will begin by reading both Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (and Joyce's poetry, critical essays, Stephen Hero, Exiles, Giacomo Joyce, and Finnegans Wake will all be incorporated into discussions), but the course will be primarily devoted to the reading and study of Ulysses. This work's centrality to, yet deviation from, the aesthetic and political preoccupations of modernism will be explored.
Primary Texts: James Joyce, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses (preferably the H.W. Gabler ed.). Supplementary Texts: Stephen Hero, Exiles, Giacomo Joyce, Finnegans Wake, and Poems and Shorter Writings, ed. Richard Ellmann, A. Walton Litz, and John Whittier-Ferguson (Faber). (Students are not expected to buy the supplementary texts.)
7980 The Modern(ist) Novel/Ms. Johnson
T.S. Eliot, reviewing Ulysses, hesitated to describe the book as a "novel": "If it is not a novel, that is simply because the novel is a form which will no longer serve; it is because the novel, instead of being a form, was simply the expression of an age which had not sufficiently lost all form to feel the need of something stricter." Victorian society had itself a "form" and so could make use of that "loose baggy monster," the novel. Modernity, being itself formless, needed something more. Taking issue with Eliot’s diagnosis of the novel’s unfitness for modern purposes, the premise of this course will be that in the hands of the modernists the novel flourished. Ironically, the very unfitness of the Victorian novel for the expression of what Hardy called "the ache of modernism" stimulated the modernists to experiment, adapt, innovate. The result is one of the richest periods in the history of narrative fiction. We begin with Hardy’s "ache" and end with the "—" of which its author wrote, "I have an idea that I will invent a new name for my books to supplant 'novel.' A new — by Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy?"
Primary Texts: Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891; Norton Critical Ed.); Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891; Norton Critical Ed.); Henry James, The Ambassadors (1900; Norton Critical Ed.); Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (1907; any ed.); Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915; Norton Critical Ed.); James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (1916; Vintage); D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love (1920; any ed.); Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927; any ed.). Everyone will be expected to read, independently, at least two other novels from a longer list available in Oxford. Secondary Texts: The Narrative Reader, ed. Martin McQuillan (Routledge).
Group IV (American Literature)
There are no Group IV or Group V courses at Oxford in 2008, except for 7950 Atlantic Crossings: Anglo-American Literary Relations, 1798–1900, which will carry one unit of Group III and one unit of Group IV credit. See description under Group III offerings.