English 45A

Book List

Behn, Aphra: Oroonoko, The Rover, and Other Works; Greenblatt, Stephen: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volumes A-C

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.

Book List: Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, The Rover, and Other Works  (Penguin); Stephen Greenblatt, ed., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volumes A-C (Norton).  If you purchase the Norton at the UC Bookstore, it will be bundled with a free copy of the Norton Critical Edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.