English 45A

Other Readings and Media

Chaucer, G.: Canterbury Tales ; Spenser, E.: Edmund Spenser’s Poetry; Marlowe, C.: Doctor Faustus; Donne, J.: John Donne's Poetry; Milton, J.: Paradise Lost

Description

This class introduces students to the production of poetic narrative in English through the close study of major works in that tradition: the Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queene, Doctor Faustus, Donne's lyrics, and Paradise Lost. Each of these texts reflects differently on the ambition of poetry to encompass the range of a culture’s experience. We will focus particularly on the relationships of different genres to different kinds of knowledge, to see how different ways of expressing things make possible new things to express, as English culture and English poetry transform each other from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries.