English Literature: 1660-1850

Here are the specific books I'm ordering for the survey course I'll be teaching next term.

Stanley Appelbaum, English Romantic Poetry: An Anthology
Jane Austen, Persuasion
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders
Alexander Pope, Essay on Man and Other Poems
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto

Also, I've a rather full Reader of plays, stories, excerpts from novels, poems, and essays: Restoration drama and poetry; Richardson's Pamela (in part); the Graveyard/Elegy school; "A Modest Proposal"; among others.  In addition, I tend to supplement the assigned material with impromptu handouts on an almost weekly basis.

Dover Thrift editions too.

Marching Orders

William Shakespeare's Macbeth;
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein;
Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest;
Guy de Maupassant's The Necklace and Other Short Stories;
Mark Strand and Eavan Boland's The Making of a Poem;
E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News;
assorted stories and poems via handouts;
and some appropriate film clips.

English 1B: Spring 2013

Northrup Frye: Imagination Trumps Experience

No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us.  Only the arts and sciences can do that, and of these, only literature gives us the whole sweep and range of human imagination as it sees itself.  It seems to be very difficult for many people to understand the reality and intensity of literary experience.  To give an example that you may think a bit irrelevant: why have so many people managed to convince themselves that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare's plays, when there is not on atom of evidence that anybody else did?  Apparently because they feel that poetry must be written out of personal experience, and that Shakespeare didn't have enough experience of the right kind.  But Shakespeare's plays weren't produced by his experience: they were produced by his imagination, and the way to develop the imagination is to read a good book or two.

--Northrup Frye, from his The Educated Imagination
(emphasis, mine)

Let's all "read a good book or two" . . . this week.  And the same the following week.  Imagine what greatness, what expansion of experience, what increased depth and breadth of imagination . . . therein awaits.