To learn common vocabulary from the Masters and Mistresses of Literature.
To acquire some basic literary vocabulary and learn how it applies to our texts.
To read and understand a significant body of difficult literary texts which illustrate the dominant values of the day in which they were written.
To graduate from the class having acquired a basic understanding of the conflict of values embodied in our class texts. Specifically, we will explore the following ideas in our common readings:
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The Romantic idea that "altered perception" --whether that perception be altered by drugs, insanity, ignorance or education -- can teach us anything useful (Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience and Coleridge's "Kubla Khan")
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The growing urban, industrial movement which threatens to overwhelm idealized rural values and traditional ways of life replacing those old values with what the Romantics saw as anxiety, greed, and loss of integrity (See especially Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience and Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads)
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The idea that Nature is a presence which can teach us useful spiritual truths and heal our souls (See especially Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads)
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The growing influence of the scientific frame of mind which seems to be weakening traditional religious and domestic values (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Bram Stoker's Dracula)
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The growing awareness that the repression of women may be artificially constructed by society and founded on a male's fear of woman's powers (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, E.B. Browning's Aurora Leigh, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Virginia Woolf's short fictions)
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The suspicion that modern life is no more sophisticated than the primitive, natural, that modern society conspires to hide its own primitive impulses which, nevertheless, lurk uneasily just beneath the surface of our conscious minds (Conrad's Heart of Darkness)
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Man for
the field and woman for the hearth: |
