English Literature Syllabus
Click here to download a printable copy of the syllabusPlease clear your topic for Paper #1 with Mrs. Muller by Friday, 9/28. Please see Essay Guidelines for more specific ideas about essay structure and pitfalls to avoid.
Week 5, 10/3: Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book I, cantos 1-5
***Paper #1 due by midnight, PST, 10/5.***
Week 6, 10/10: Faerie Queene, Book I, cantos 6-12
Week 7, 10/17: Faerie Queene, Book II, canto 12, stanzas 42-87, Book III, cantos i-xii plus summaries of those cantos not in the anthology.
*** Poetry memorization/imitation #1 due in class 10/17.
Week 8, 10/24: Marlowe, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
***Timed Writing #1, 10/24, after class (3:10-3:50 p.m. PST)***
Week 9, 10/31: Shakespeare's sonnets: 18, 19, 20, 29, 73,87, 116,127, 130, and 147, and Twelfth Night, Acts I-III.
Please clear your topic for Paper #2 with Mrs. Muller by Friday, 11/2.
Week 10, 11/7: Twelfth Night, Acts IV and V.
***Paper #2 due by midnight, PST, 11/19.***
Week 11, 11/14: 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, 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.
THANKSGIVING BREAK, 11/21 (No class)
Week 12, 11/28: 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"
Week 13, 12/5: 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", Marvell: "The Coronet", "A Dialogue Between Soul and Body", "Damon the Mower", "The Mower's Song"
Week 14, 12/12: 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", "Lycidas", "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, 12/19: 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 Friday, 12/21.
CHRISTMAS BREAK, 12/26 and 1/2 (No class)
Week 16, 1/9: Swift, "Abolishing Christianity in England", "A Modest Proposal", Pope, "The Rape of the Lock"
**Paper #3 due 1/11 by midnight PST.***
Week 17, 1/16: William Cowper: from "The Task", "The Castaway" from Johnson's "Dictionary", Boswell: from "Life of Samuel Johnson"
*** Timed Essay Final after class, 1/16, from 3:10-4:10 p.m. PST***
Second Semester
Week 18, 1/23: 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, 1/30: William Blake: "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", Robert Burns: all poems in 7th edition
Week 20, 2/6: Thomas Paine: "Rights of Man", Burke: "Reflections on the Revolution in France" and Wollstonecraft: "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman"
Week 21, 2/13: 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"
Please clear your topic for Paper #4 with Mrs. Muller by Friday, 2/15.
Week 22, 2/20: 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, PST, 2/22. ***
Week 23, 2/27: 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", "The Eve of St. Agnes" , "When I Have Fears", "La Belle Dame Sans Merci", "Sonnet to Sleep", "Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Ode on Melancholy"
Week 24, 3/5: The Victorian Age Background, Carlyle: "Sartor Resartus"
Week 25, 3/12: 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 26, 3/19: Tennyson: "Lady of Shalott", "The Coming of Arthur", "The Passing of Arthur", "In Memoriam"
Week 27, 3/26: 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 28, 4/2: 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".
Please clear your topic for Paper #5 with Mrs. Muller by Friday, 4/4.
Week 29, 4/9: Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, Acts I-II
***Paper #5 due by midnight, PST on 4/11.***
Week 30, 4/16: Earnest, Act III, plus 20th century introduction
Spring Break, 4/23 (No class)
Week 31, 4/30: Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Week 32, 5/7: 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, 5/14: 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", "A Dialogue of Self and Soul" "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.
Please clear your topic for Paper #6 with Mrs. Muller by Friday, 5/16. You may choose to write 1250-1500 words on whatever you wish, but it may not be a creative paper.
Week 34, 5/21: 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, PST on 5/23***
Week 35, 5/28: Thomas, "The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower", "After the Funeral", "Fern Hill", "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night". Heaney, "Digging", "Casualty". Boland, "That the Science of Cartography is Limited", "The Dolls Museum in Dublin", "The Lost Land". Hughes, "Wind", "Relic", "Pike", "Examination at the Womb-Door", "Theology", "The Seven Sorrows", "Daffodils".
*** Timed Essay Final 5/28 after class, from 3:10 to 4:10 p.m. PST***