English 45A

Book List

Behn, Aphra: Oroonoko, The Rover, and Other Works; Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Canterbury Tales; Greenblatt, Stephen: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 1

Description

This course will introduce students to Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe, Donne, and Milton; to literary history as a mode of inquiry;  and to the analysis of the way literature makes meaning, produces emotional experience, and shapes the way human beings think about desire, commerce, liberty, God, power, the environment, subjectivity, empire, justice, death, and science.  We will study how a literary text emerges out of the author's reading of his or her predecessors and in relation to contemporary political, religious, social, and scientific discourses and events.