Aspects of Literary History: Reading and Interpreting of Poetry
Aspects of Literary History: Spring and Summer Terms 2008
Aspects of Literary History course, convenor: Dr Alistair Davies [B331] [H.A.Davies@sussex.ac.uk]
Welcome to the Aspects of Literary History course. This is an ambitious course with a number of separate but interwoven strands:
1) The course will introduce you to some of the key concepts of literary history.
2) The course will enact literary history by examining the history of a particular mode of writing from its Greek origins through the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, twenty and twenty-first centuries. You will be asked to think in terms of specific literary historical periods.
3) The course will make you more familiar with the reading and interpreting of poetry, with particular attention to improving your skills in close reading.
4) The course will examine pastoral poetry from its origins in the Greek Idylls, its dissemination through Roman models and its diversification into many forms: the elegy, the country house poem, the love lyric, the poem of reflection, the philosophical poem, the nature poem and the satire.
5) The course will focus historically on the pastoral not simply because it provides the originating mode for these diverse forms but because it is the product of a specific political and social culture: an elite form produced originally in a slave culture (Greek) and disseminated through another slave culture (Roman). This will give you the basis for thinking about the historical contextualization of the pastoral as a form.
6) How have later English poets – from the seventeenth century onwards – made use of the political and social entailments of the pastoral form? How have they expanded it by the introduction of a Christian content? How have American poets made use of the form in response to the colonization of the New World, a process seen by many (at the time and subsequently) through the means of the pastoral?
7) The
Aspects of Literary History course, convenor: Dr Alistair Davies [B331] [H.A.Davies@sussex.ac.uk]
Welcome to the Aspects of Literary History course. This is an ambitious course with a number of separate but interwoven strands:
1) The course will introduce you to some of the key concepts of literary history.
2) The course will enact literary history by examining the history of a particular mode of writing from its Greek origins through the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, twenty and twenty-first centuries. You will be asked to think in terms of specific literary historical periods.
3) The course will make you more familiar with the reading and interpreting of poetry, with particular attention to improving your skills in close reading.
4) The course will examine pastoral poetry from its origins in the Greek Idylls, its dissemination through Roman models and its diversification into many forms: the elegy, the country house poem, the love lyric, the poem of reflection, the philosophical poem, the nature poem and the satire.
5) The course will focus historically on the pastoral not simply because it provides the originating mode for these diverse forms but because it is the product of a specific political and social culture: an elite form produced originally in a slave culture (Greek) and disseminated through another slave culture (Roman). This will give you the basis for thinking about the historical contextualization of the pastoral as a form.
6) How have later English poets – from the seventeenth century onwards – made use of the political and social entailments of the pastoral form? How have they expanded it by the introduction of a Christian content? How have American poets made use of the form in response to the colonization of the New World, a process seen by many (at the time and subsequently) through the means of the pastoral?
7) The