ENGL 320 - Studies in Literary Traditions

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

This course examines various literary traditions. The materials may cross historical, national and linguistic boundaries, and may investigate how a specific myth, literary form, idea, or figure (e.g., Pygmalion, romance, the epic, the fall of man, Caliban) has been constructed, disputed, reinvented and transformed. Topics vary from year to year.

Topic for 2017/18b: Transatlantic Romanticism: Ecology & the Sublime. This course looks at nineteenth-century British and American romanticism from the dual perspective of the sublime (in mind and nature) and the environment (as it intersects with issues of democracy and pluralism). These two seemingly contradictory impulses are part of a larger movement that could be thought of as radical, in the original sense of ‘forming the root,’ in establishing modern British and American culture. Readings include works by William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Clare, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, William James, W.E.B. Du Bois and others. One or two field trips to local sites are included. Paul Kane.

One 2-hour period.

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