English 45A

Book List

Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Canterbury Tales: A Selection; Donne, John: Poetry; Milton, John: Paradise Lost; Shakespeare, William: Macbeth; Shakespeare, William: Sonnets

Description

In this course we will read some of the best books ever written in English, and the course will try to treat both you and those books seriously and justly. The course will give you a sense of the shape of literary history from the earlier middle ages through 1667: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton will get our closest attention, but they will also provide the scaffolding on which to hang a more detailed picture of the imaginative and intellectual development of literature. It will work hard to give you the skills to read easily and intelligently (and out loud) the earlier forms of the language in which these works are written, and to develop also the skills by which you can take writing apart and see how it works. It will also take up the big questions raised by the whole undertaking: what literary art is good for, what forms of reason and understanding are most at home in it, and why the past is worth bothering with--all, in fact, questions that the works themselves are preoccupied with.