Classes

English 90gt: The Age of Johnson: Seminar

Semester: 
Spring
Offered: 
2012

will examine the works of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell (Johnson's biographer), Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, Edward Gibbon, Oliver Goldsmith, Frances Burney, Robert Burns, and others. Essays, biography, political and historical writing, poetry, and the novel.

English 54: Poets: English Romantic Poets

Semester: 
Spring
Offered: 
2012

Readings in Blake, Baillie, Coleridge, Clare, Wordsworth, Wollstonecraft, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and others. Lyric and narrative forms. Close aesthetic readings linked to thematic considerations. Social and political contexts. Romanticism as an artistic movement and cultural era.

English 242: Restoration and 18th-Century Texts: Graduate Seminar

Semester: 
Fall
Offered: 
2011

Dryden, Pope, Swift, Johnson, Burke, Gibbon, Montagu, and others; the lyric, periodical literature, satire, biography, and drama; relations of engaged literature with politics, religion, history; issues of audience, gender, class, genre, and canon.
Note: An intensive introduction to 18th-century literature at the graduate level. Presupposes no previous acquaintance with field. Graduate students who have studied 18th-century literature should consult with the instructor. Open to qualified honors undergraduates.

Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding 15: Elements of Rhetoric

Semester: 
Fall
Offered: 
2011

Rhetorical theory, originating with Aristotle, in contemporary applications. The nature of rhetoric in modern culture; practical examples drawn from American history and literature 1765 to the present; written exercises and attention to public speaking; the history and educational importance of rhetoric in the West; stresses theory and practice as inseparable.