ENGLISH 211: English Literature Beowulf to Dryden

John Dryden (1631-1700)   "The Wanderer" MS (c. 965)  Aphra Behn (1640?-89)

Section .01 / Fall 2007
Instructor: Arnie Sanders [Click here for all course web pages, CV, recent research, etc.]
Department of English, Goucher College Office Hours, Fall '07, 3:30-4:30 MW, and by appointment  Page last updated: 12/10/2007 09:46:59 AM

Recent site news--12/10/07: Any of you remember Hamlet?  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nlhm5rrfbg&feature=related  I thought you might need some comic relief while studying and editing those final papers.

Copied from the English 211 Public Folder on the exam study guide notes posted by Os, Lara, and Kim: "You are making progress, but it's very content-based at the moment, like the art history student who says, of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes, "they're religious" or "they depict the Creation" without considering color, arrangement of themes, figural gestures (those two outstretched hands, fingers almost touching with a tantalizing gap between them--what's with that?).  Think about what makes this stuff "literature" rather than history or random surviving paper artifacts from which historians might construct a thesis about reality.  Remember Sidney's distinction between the worlds of the poet and historian.  The historian tells us, as literally as possible, what has been--big whoop.  The poet tells us what could have been, might be, or could be coming toward us.  The historian, "on oath" as a truth-teller, often does not use figures of speech like metaphor, simile, irony, paradox, ambiguity (a major no-no), parallelism and repetition with variation.  Nor do historians typically use rhyme, meter, stanza structure, acts and scenes, parallel plots, or other artistic devices that poets use to make memorable and beautiful their speculative utterances.  Poets are creating something new, something that has never been before, and their tools of art reside in the distortions of language with which they create these "true illusions."  So for each work in which you catch yourself remembering only "what it said" or "what it was about," try to go back and add something about the poets' technique in creating it so that you will be able to distinguish it from a mere piece of historical prose.  Even Halkett and Hutchinson (the "memoirs") and Behn and Ralegh ("biography" and "political essay") have more art in them than the typical modern version of the same kind of document."

    Some things we left out: "folk" music, largely orally transmitted, accidentally preserved in text, like "Westron Wind" (8th p. 437) "Sir Patrick Spens" (8th p. 2902) until Francis J. Child's The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (published in eight volumes, 1892-98) (Note: this is a link to an adequate text but the U. Hawaii Linguistics Oral Literature page is better, though temporarily inactive.); and Medieval miscellany manuscripts like the Auchinleck Manuscript.  They are the popular literature of the pre-modern era, and are not often studied in survey courses which concentrate on the "high literature" tradition that favors named authors, determinate texts (usually in Early Modern print editions), and generic complexity.  But that's why we have other literature courses in the major!

Passages for Monday's The Way of the World class, identified by Act and 8th/7th-edition page numbers, are available.  If you have not yet picked a paper topic, look at those passages and the thematic issues associated with them for some possibilities.

    If you know how to use a concordance, I've discovered a fairly new online concordance site at Nagoya University (Japan) that covers nearly all our authors in the second half of the semester, plus rather a lot from 212.  Here's the URL--bookmark it against future need!: http://victorian.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/concordance/

Are you thinking about the second paper yet?  Casey asked to see my file of sample successful second papers from previous years and that reminded me that Thanksgiving Vacation can be an ideal time to brainstorm.  You're rested, a little more relaxed, and you have some time to yourself.  Take a look at the requirements for the paper before you start, though.  The two key requirements are that the paper "must be concerned with at least two works of literature we will have read by the end of the course, and the primary focus may not be on a text read before the midterm exam" and it must "refer to at least some scholarly secondary sources."  If using secondary sources has you worried, read this guide to why and when (in the paper) scholars typically refer to other scholars' work.

In-Class Presentation Schedule   Please do not hesitate to talk to me by phone, email or conference regarding your choice of poet, poem, or passage, your performance of it, or your analysis of what you learned by concentrating upon that poem/passage and by reading aloud.  Click here for a guide to what I hope to see in your presentation.

Two general pieces of information:

        From your friends at the Academic Policies Committee of the faculty:  "Academic Honor Code: Reference to the academic honor code is required of all course syllabi as a reminder to students.  Suggested wording includes: Reminder: All students are bound by the standards of the Academic Honor Code, found at www.goucher.edu/documents/General/AcademicHonorCode.pdf."  Consider it done, folks.  I, Arnie Sanders, believe that you would sooner submit to amputation than let another's words be passed off as your own, because you recognize that literacy gives you a chance to make your words live forever, or at least for as long as people read the language in which you write them.  Nevertheless, I also have noticed more casual cut-and-paste theft of unacknowledged sources in freshman writing, so if you are a sophomore and did not unlearn that habit in freshman composition, be forewarned that I will detect it and be deeply disappointed as I try to decide whether you intentionally committed "mugging-by-plagiarism" of another author or are merely badly trained.  (The former cases go to the Honor Board and the latter get only one chance to make amends by submitting a revision, after which they will be watched carefully for relapses.)  More worrisomely, students are increasingly content to cite sources long after their prose has begun to borrow ideas from those sources.  That is technically plagiarism, too, but it has become so common that I must spend gallons of ink and hundreds of keystrokes un-teaching it.  Never make me guess whose ideas I'm reading.  Cite sources when you first depend on them.  I want to know how well you can think, not how well your sources can think, which is a matter of historical record for anyone who reads them.  Let there be a bright line of fire between ideas that are originally yours and those of other writers to which you refer.  One last reminder: you have to cite primary sources and list them in your Works Cited section, especially now that you might be using either the 7th or 8th edition of the Norton.

         If you are a rising sophomore and if you believe you want to major in English, you also should register for English 200 this fall to prepare yourself to write for the major.  It is not a prerequisite for English 211, but students who have taken or are taking 200 have a significant advantage in 211 over those who have not. 

Course Description

        English 211 introduces you to British authors, works, genres, ideas, and movements which will help you understand the development of the English language and its literature from its earliest inceptions to the emergence of Modern English in mass market print production. During this period, English culture was transformed from a small group of feudal kingdoms, each based on landed wealth controlled by a hierarchical aristocracy and the church, to a single nation-state ruled by a parliamentary government and based on an international capitalist trading empire that reached from the Appalachian Mountains of North America to India in the East. For English majors, the course's emphasis on the "big picture" will provide essential context for interpretations of works studied at greater length in upper-division courses. For non-majors and majors alike, the course offers the chance to explore your language's heritage in the works of its most influential and talented writers.  Our goal is to surrender to these texts long enough to experience their effects upon an audience of competent readers, and to separate ourselves from them with enough insight to detect the strategies by which they subjected us to "the dream of the text."

        Before the first class meeting, please read the "Syllabus View" and  "Bottom Line" pages to see how the course is constructed and what graded work will be considered for the final course grade.  Read the "Text Book Purchases" page for important advice if you are going to buy the books early and read ahead.  If you are worried about how to remember and understand what you read for the course, click here for my single best  piece of advice about how to study.  To understand how the syllabus was constructed and English 211's main goals for its students, read this historical overview of the course's readings and this rationale for why you should care about this course.  These three short descriptions of Old English (the language of the Anglo-Saxon tribes in England), Middle English, and Early Modern English also will  help you understand the course's historical/linguistic "flow."  Around Thanksgiving of each semester, we finally break through into Modern English when reading literature produced during and after the English Civil War (1642-59).   You would do well to read a bit about what distinguishes "modern" mentalities from "pre-modern" ones.  It's a huge cultural and psychological leap.

        The Norton Anthology has included women writers only in the comparatively recent history, and women writers still are under-represented in typical print surveys of early literature.  Click here for the Brown University Women Writers Project:  (Goucher College users only--subscription account.) You can find additional works by early women writers at the Emory Women Writers Resource Project at Emory University's Lewis H. Beck Center.

since August 31, 2007 reset.  Last year, between August 29, 2006 and August 31, 2007, we had 5086 hits.  Between September 2, 2005 and August 29, 2006, this page had 4414 hits.  Between August 30, 2004 and September 2, 2005, this page had 4984 hits.  The year before it had 3506 hits, and the year before that it had 3198 hits.