English Literature Syllabus 2009-2010
Click here to download a printable copy of the syllabusPlease clear your topic for Paper #1 with Mrs. Muller by Friday, 9/25. Please see Essay Guidelines for more specific ideas about essay structure and pitfalls to avoid.
Week 5, 9/30: Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book I, cantos 1-5 (in Fierce Wars and Faithful Loves)
***Paper #1 due by midnight, CST, 10/2.***
Week 6, 10/7: Faerie Queene, Book I, cantos 6-12 (in Fierce Wars and Faithful Loves)
Week 7, 10/14: Marlowe, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
***Timed Writing #1, 10/14, after class (4:10-4:50 p.m. CST)***
Week 8, 10/21: Shakespeare: all sonnets in anthology
Week 9, 10/28: Shakespeare,Twelfth Night, Acts I-III.*** Poetry memorization/imitation #1 due in class 10/28.
Week 10, 11/4: Twelfth Night, Acts IV and V.
Please clear your topic for Paper #2 with Mrs. Muller by Friday, 11/6.
Week 11, 11/11: 17th Century Introduction, Donne: "The Flea," "The Good Morrow," "Song" (both by that title), "The Undertaking," "The Sun Rising," "The Indifferent," "A Valediction: Of Weeping," "The Canonization," "The Relic," “The Bait”, “The Apparition”, “A Valediction: Forbidden Mourning”, Satire 3, Holy Sonnets: 1, 5, 7, 9, 10, 13, 14, 17, 18, and 19, "Good Friday, 1613-Riding Westward," "A Hymn to Christ," "Hymn to God My God in My Sickness," "A Hymn to God the Father," Meditation 17, 19 and from "Death's Duel" (starts "First, then, we consider this exitus mortis..."to the end.
***Paper #2 due by midnight, CST, 11/13.***
Week 12, 11/18: Jonson: Volpone, "To My Book," "On Something, That Walks Somewhere," "To William Camden," "On My First Daughter," "To John Donne," On My First Son”, "Inviting a Friend to Supper," "To Penshurst," "To Celia," "To Heaven," "Still To Be Neat," "Slow, Slow, Fresh Fount," "To the Memory of My Beloved, The Author, William Shakespeare," "Ode to Himself"
THANKSGIVING BREAK, 11/25 (No class)
Week 13, 12/2: Herbert: "The Altar," "Redemption," "Easter Wings," "Affliction (1)," "Prayer (1)," "Church Monuments," "Denial," "Virtue," "The Collar," "Discipline," "Love (3)"; Herrick: "Delight in Disorder," "Corinna's Going A-Maying," "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time," "His Prayer to Ben Jonson," "Upon Julia's Clothes"
*** Poetry memorization/imitation #2 due in class 12/2.
Week 14, 12/9: Marvell: "The Coronet," "A Dialogue Between Soul and Body," "Damon the Mower," "The Mower's Song"; Milton: "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity" ("The Hymn" is part of this poem-- read the first four stanzas PLUS the 27 following), "On Shakespeare," "Areopagitica," "How Soon Hath Time," "On the New Forcers...," "When I Consider How My Light is Spent," "On the Late Massacre in Piedmont," "Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint"
Week 15, 12/16: 18th Century Background, Bunyan: from "Grace Abounding" and "Pilgrim's Progress," Butler: from "Hudibras"
Please clear your topic for Paper #3 with Mrs. Muller by Wednesday, 12/16. Turn in outline by Friday, 12/18.
CHRISTMAS BREAK, 12/23 and 12/30 (No class)
Week 16, 1/6: Swift, "Abolishing Christianity in England," "A Modest Proposal," Pope, "The Rape of the Lock"
**Paper #3 due 1/8 by midnight CST.***
Week 17, 1/13: William Cowper: from "The Task," "The Castaway" from Johnson's "Dictionary," Boswell: from "Life of Samuel Johnson"
*** Timed Essay Final after class, 1/13, from 4:10-5:10 p.m. CST***
Second Semester *** Poetry memorization/imitation #3 due in class 2/3. Week 21, 2/10: Thomas Paine: "Rights of Man"; Burke: "Reflections on the Revolution in France"; Wollstonecraft: "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" Please clear your topic for Paper #4 with Mrs. Muller by Friday, 2/19. Week 23, 2/24: Coleridge: " The Eolian Harp," "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," "Kubla Khan," "The Satanic Hero" (p. 491) Byron: "Written after Swimming from Sestos to Abydos," "She Walks in Beauty," "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" ***Paper #4 due by midnight, CST, 2/26. *** Week 24, 3/3: Shelley: "Mutability," "To Wordsworth," "Ozymandias," "England in 1819," "Ode to the West Wind," "To a Skylark," "The Flower that Smiles Today," "Defence of Poetry," Keats: "From Sleep and Poetry," "When I Have Fears," "The Eve of St. Agnes," "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," "Sonnet to Sleep," "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode on Melancholy" *** Poetry memorization/imitation #4 due in class 3/31. Spring Break, 4/7 (No class) Please clear your topic for Paper #5 with Mrs. Muller by Friday, 4/16. Week 30, 4/21: Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, Acts I-II ***Paper #5 due by midnight, CST on 4/23.*** Week 31, 4/16: Earnest, Act III; 20th century introduction Please clear your topic for Paper #6 with Mrs. Muller by Friday, 5/14. You may choose to write 1250-1500 words on whatever you wish. Week 34, 5/19: Eliot, "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock," "The Waste Land," "The Hollow Men," "Journey of the Magi," "Tradition and Individual Talent," "The Metaphysical Poets" ***Paper #6 due by midnight, CST on 5/21*** Week 35, 5/26: Thomas, "The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower," "After the Funeral," "Fern Hill," "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night"; Hughes, "Wind," "Relic," "Pike," "Examination at the Womb-Door," "Theology," "The Seven Sorrows," "Daffodils"; Heaney, "Digging," "Casualty"; Boland, "That the Science of Cartography is Limited," "The Dolls Museum in Dublin," "The Lost Land"
*** Timed Essay Final 5/26 after class, from 4:10 to 5:10 p.m. CST***
Week 18, 1/20: Romantic Period Background, William Blake: "To Spring," "To Autumn," "To the Evening Star," "All Religions Are One," "There Is No Natural Religion (a and b)," From Songs of Innocence: Introduction, "The Ecchoing(sic) Green," "The Lamb," "The Little Black Boy," "The Chimney Sweeper" (both), "Holy Thursday" (both), "Nurse's Song" (both), "The Divine Image," "Infant Joy," From Songs of Experience: Introduction, "The Fly," "The Tyger," "My Pretty Rose-Tree," "The Sunflower," "Infant Sorrow," "The Human Abstract," "A Poison Tree"
Week 19, 1/27: Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility through Vol. 2, Chapter III (Chapter 25 if you have an edition without volumes)
Week 20, 2/3: Sense and Sensibility, second half
Week 22, 2/17: Wordsworth: "Preface to Lyrical Ballads" (please read this before the poetry), "We Are Seven," "Lines Written in Early Spring," "Expostulation and Reply," "The Tables Turned," "Lines: Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey," "Strange Fits of Passion," "She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways," "Three Years She Grew," "The Two April Mornings," "I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud," "My Heart Leaps Up," "Westminster Bridge," "It is a Beauteous Evening," "London 1802," "The World is Too Much with Us," "Surprised By Joy"
Week 25, 3/10: The Victorian Age Background; Newman: The Idea of a University, all exerpts in anthology
Week 26, 3/17: E.B. Browning: "Sonnets from the Portugese": 21, 22, 32, 43, "Aurora Leigh," "Mother and Poet," J.S. Mill: "What is Poetry," from "The Subjection of Women" and from "Autobiography"
Week 27, 3/24: Tennyson: "Lady of Shalott," "The Coming of Arthur," "The Passing of Arthur," "In Memoriam"
Week 28, 3/31: Robert Browning: "Porphyria's Lover," "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister," "My Last Duchess," "The Laboratory," "The Bishop Orders His Tomb," "Childe Roland," "Fra Lippo Lippi," "Love Among the Ruins"
Week 29, 4/14: Gerard Manley Hopkins: "God's Grandeur," "The Starlight Night," "As Kingfishers Catch Fire," "Spring," "The Windhover," "Pied Beauty," "Hurrahing in Harvest," "Binsey Poplars," "Duns Scotus's Oxford," "Felix Randal," "Spring and Fall," "[Carrion Comfort]," "No Worst, There Is None," "I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day," "That Nature...," "Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord," excerpts from "Journal".
Week 32, 5/5: World War I Poetry--Brooke: "The Soldier"; Thomas: "Adlestrop," "Tears," "The Owl," "Rain," "The Cherry Trees," and "As the Team's Head Brass"; Sassoon: "They," "The Rear-Guard," "Glory of Women," "Everyone Sang," "On Passing the New Menin Gate," "Memoirs of an Infantry Officer," [The Opening of the Battle of the Somme]; Gurney: "To His Love," "The Silent One". Rosenberg, "Break of Day in the Trenches," "Louse Hunting," "Returning, We Hear the Larks," "Dead Man's Dump"; Owen: "Anthem for Doomed Youth," "Apologia Pro Poemate Meo," "Miners," "Dulce Et Decorum Est," "Strange Meeting," "Futility," "Disabled," from Owen's Letters to His Mother; Cannan: "Rouen," from "Grey Ghosts and Voices"; Jones: "In Parenthesis," from Preface, from part 7: "The Five Unmistakeable Marks".
Week 33, 5/12: Yeats: "The Madness of King Goll," "The Stolen Child," "The Rose of the World," "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," "The Sorrow of Love," "When You are Old," "The Folly of Being Comforted," "Adam's Curse," "No Second Troy," "The Fascination of What's Difficult," "September 1913," "A Coat," "The Wild Swans at Coole," "Easter 1916," "The Second Coming," "A Prayer for my Daughter," "Sailing to Byzantium," "After Long Silence," "Lapis Lazuli," From Reveries over Childhood and Youth: The Yeats Family, An Irish Literature, From The Trembling of the Veil: London and Pre-Raphaelitism, Oscar Wilde, The Origin of the Lake Isle of Innisfree, The Rhymers' Club