English 179

Other Readings and Media

Heaney, S.: Beowulf; Woolf, V.: Mrs. Dalloway; a photocopied reader of articles, short stories and miscellaneous poems from across a thousand years of English literature

Description

The medium of literature is language. This course will explore this relationship through a survey of literary forms defined by linguistic forms, and consideration of how these literary forms are both like and unlike forms of non-literary language. These literary forms include meter; rhyme and alliteration; syntactic parallelism and other syntactic structures special to poetry; formulas of oral composition; and special narrative uses of pronouns, tenses and other subjective features of language to express point of view and render 'represented speech and thought'. The emphasis will be on literature in English, but comparisons with literature in other languages will also be drawn. No knowledge of linguistics will be presupposed, but linguistic concepts will be introduced, explained and used.