E301 4827 LITERATURES IN ENGLISH TO 1600
Karma Lochrie

1:00p-2:15p TR (30 students) 3 cr., A&H. Open to English majors and declared minors only.

This course is an introduction to major works of English literature from the beginnings of English culture to 1600. The focus of the course will be on cultural contact, including the ways in which the evolving English culture imagined itself in relation to the Other, its concepts of community and nation, and its attitudes towards the foreign. We will read a variety of texts from Beowulf to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to Spenser's Faerie Queene, raising questions about the literary canon, concepts of literary influence and poetic genres, and the way the "medieval" is imagined in relation to the modern. The course will include two papers, a midterm, and a final exam.