ENG 124: Great Writers of English Literature I: Dragons. Dames. Doubles. Demons. Dunces.
Dr. Kathleen Urda
Mondays 2 pm - 4:45 pm, in person
Section: D01H
Chances are, even if you have never read a word of Beowulf, King Lear, or Paradise Lost, you are familiar with ideas, characters, stories, images, and sometimes even language, from these texts. Why do these texts and their authors, generally recognized as some of the greatest in English Literature, continue to haunt popular imagination and media today? This course invites students on a quest to explore that question through careful and deep reading, writing, and conversation about a representative selection of major authors’ works from pre-nineteenth-century English literature and their respective historical contexts.
While we focus most on five writers in particular – the Beowulf poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, John Milton, and Alexander Pope – we will also look at texts by twentieth and twenty-first century writers like Maria Dahvana Headley and Zadie Smith, as well as other current media, which actively engage with these earlier writers and works as we ponder why (and if) they remain relevant to changing cultures and populations. This course is an honors class, which is reflected in the challenging nature of the reading for the course; we will, however, spend time together in class reading aloud and working towards a shared understanding and appreciation of these authors and texts. Formal assignments for this writing intensive will consist of several shorter critical responses (including essay exams), a researched final essay, and a short oral presentation based on the final essay.