Texts Required:

Barnet, Burto, and Cain. Literature for Composition, 9^th edition.

Shelley, Frankenstein (Puffin Classics)

In this course, you will learn to read critically, to enter relevant conversations about the texts you encounter, and to write effectively about texts as literature. Since writing is a way of thinking and understanding, this course will be concerned with the writing process as well as the written product. Therefore, we will be writing a great deal, revising and reassessing ideas and interpretations as they grow. We will also be considering our audience’s responses to those ideas in class discussion of the texts we encounter and the writing we do. We will accomplish this through deconstruction, or breaking down the texts to find their meaning, and through semiotics, or the signs that the authors use to direct us, as readers, to the meaning of the texts.

As a writer, you should gain a more refined sense of how to express your perspectives on the texts. You will learn to argue for your interpretations persuasively to specific audiences. You will also learn to read more closely and to listen more carefully. As a result, you will come to understand others better – both in the class and in the literature – and to be better understood yourself. To aid you in this process, we will also be concentrating on the important tools of good writing, such as grammar, punctuation, and spelling. You will learn how to express your ideas logically and cohesively, and this process will be aided and abetted by feedback on your writing from your instructor.

ENGL 3206:   The 18th Century English Novel 

Spring 2012 3 credits

Classroom:  C201 TU/TH 6-9 pm       

Instructor: Susan Glover  sglover@laurentian.ca  

The gothic, the historical novel, the Bildungsroman, and “chick lit” all emerged from the fictional experimentation of the eighteenth century. This course explores the emergence of the English novel over the hundred-year period beginning in the early 1700s, tracing its development from early amatory fiction and the interiority provided by the epistolary form, to the dark side of “the enlightenment” in the gothic and the political challenges of the revolutionary period. We will consider the development of narrative form, the fictional constructions of gendered concepts of the self, the generic focus on marriage, and the political and cultural “work” of the novel.

Texts Required:

Short works by Mary Davys and Eliza Haywood (available online)

Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders. Oxford UP.

Richardson, Samuel. Pamela. Ed. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely. Oxford UP.

Walpole, Horace. Castle of Otranto. Ed.W. S. Lewis. Oxford UP.

Bage, Robert. Hermsprong. Ed. P. Perkins. Broadview Press.

Radcliffe, Ann. The Italian. Ed. F. Garber. Oxford UP.

Goals of the course

·   to read a range of prose fiction and early novels in England, and consider the literary and formal elements of what will become the dominant genre of literature in English

·   to understand the social and cultural world in which these works are created, and the ways by which these texts both respond to and reshape that world

·   to understand the role of the novel in creating the gendered individual of the modern western world

·   to develop further your skills in writing, literary analysis, critical reasoning, oral expression, research, and information literacy

ENGL 2677:  Popular Literature & Culture: Children’s Literature

Spring 2012 3 credits

Classroom:  C309   Monday & Wednesdays 6-9 pm       

Instructor: Hoi Cheu  hcheu@laurentian.ca