ENGL 115 X - Intro to British Literature

Campus: Urbana-Champaign

Description:

Acquaints students with the rich diversity of British prose, poetry, and drama. As a basic introduction to English literature, the course explores a series of literary texts, often thematically related, which appeal to modern readers and at the same time provide interesting insights into the cultural attitudes and values of the periods which produced them.

Special Instructions:

"How do I love thee": Desire, Romance, and Amour Down the Ages Alan Badiou, in "In Praise of Love" mourns, how, in the current consumerist world, love has been reduced to a risk-free adventure, a "mere variant of desire and hedonism". We could take this as a cue to sit back and interrogate how love has conceptually evolved down the ages and what different shades of its representation in literature could mean. In this course, we shall limit our attention to British literature and read closely an eclectic selection of texts across genres right from the medieval ages to the modern era. We shall ask ourselves how amour has been informed by the politics of their time and space, and how we could employ our contemporary sensibility to interpret the canonical subjects and objects of amour without compromising on the pleasure of reading. We begin by studying the Arthurian romance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, before turning our attention to sonnets by Thomas Wyatt, Philip Sidney, and Will

Option 1

Course Level: Undergraduate

Credit: 3

Term(s): Spring