English 179

Book List

Heaney, S.: Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (Bilingual Edition); Woolf, V: Mrs. Dalloway;

Recommended: Pinker, S: The Language Instinct

Other Readings and Media

A reader containing miscellaneous articles and literary texts, including poems of Shakespeare, Yeats, Thomas, Dylan, Blake and others, and stories of Mansfield. 

Description

The medium of literature is language.  This course aims to deepen understanding of what this means through consideration of how certain literary forms can be defined as grammatical forms.  These literary forms include meter; rhyme and alliteration; syntactic parallelism; formulas of oral composition; and special narrative uses of pronouns, tenses and other subjective features of language to express point of view and represent 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.