ENGL2841: What is Literature? Literary Thought from Antiquity to Modernity

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• To survey European and English literary thought, along with its origins and neighbouring traditions, from antiquity to the early twentieth century, covering a range of authors, works, and topics essential to a basic orientation in this field
• To completement students work in the earlier periods of English literature, as well as enrich their engagements with later, twentieth- and twenty-first-century developments in the subject

• The module will address a wide range of topics in this field, including the following:
• What is literature? How have answers to this question changed over the long history of European literary thought, and what can we learn from them about our current views and debates?
• How did literature emerge out of the vast oral tradition which preceded it? What happened to poems and stories once they began to be written down, and what does this mean for our attempts to understand literatures origins?
• Who were the first literary critics? How do their views differ from, and to what degree do they anticipate, those of more recent times?
• Why did poets quarrel with philosophers in ancient Greece, and why did Plato advocate the banishment of poetry from an ideal human society?
• How did Aristotle first attempt to create poeticsa science of literature, comparable to physics or mathematicsand why were his insights forgotten about for centuries?
• What did early literary theorists have to say about such topics, among others, as myth, allegory, and symbol; the tragic and the comic; imitation and originality; censorship and poetic licence?
• What is the relationship between literature and other fields and disciplines? Is it a mere coincidence that the modern notion of imaginative literature emerges at the same time as modern science?
• How did we discover that literature has a history, and develop an interest in reading literary works in terms of their original historical contexts?
• What have we learned from folklore scholars and anthropologists, and how did their insights inform another wave of attempts to create a science of literature, by the early twentieth-century schools now typically referred to as formalism and structuralism?
• The module will engage with the work of the following authors or works (sample list): The Derveni Papyrus, Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Hrosvitha of Gandersheim, Widsith, Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides),John Tzetzes, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Snorri Sturluson, Dante Alighieri, Christine de Pizan, Stephen Gosson, Philip Sidney, Francis Bacon, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, Elizabeth Cooper, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edgar Allan Poe, Laura Johnson Wylie, Joel Elias Spingarn, Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, Vladimir Propp, Ren Wellek

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• Subject-specific Knowledge:
• Students who complete the module will possess an essential orientation in the long history of European and English literary thought, along with its origins and neighbouring traditions, from antiquity to the early twentieth century.
• Students who complete the module additionally benefit from their engagement with this content in their work on the other modules, especially those focusing on literary theory and criticism, and/or earlier periods of English literary history.

Subject-specific Skills:

• Students studying this module will develop:
• critical skills in the close reading and analysis of texts.
• an ability to demonstrate knowledge of a range of texts and critical approaches.
• informed awareness of formal and aesthetic dimensions of literature and ability to offer cogent analysis of their workings in specific texts.
• sensitivity to generic conventions and to the shaping effects on communication of historical circumstances, and to the affective power of language.
• an ability to articulate and substantiate an imaginative response to literature.
• an ability to articulate knowledge and understanding of concepts and theories relating to literary studies.
• skills of effective communication and argument.
• awareness of conventions of scholarly presentation, and bibliographic skills including accurate citation of sources and consistent use of scholarly conventions of presentation.
• command of a broad range of vocabulary and an appropriate critical terminology.
• awareness of literature as a medium through which values are affirmed and debated.

Key Skills:

• Students studying this module will develop:
• a capacity to analyse critically.
• an ability to acquire complex information of diverse kinds in a structured and systematic way involving the use of distinctive interpretative skills derived from the subject.
• competence in the planning and execution of assessed work.
• a capacity for independent thought and judgement, and ability to assess the critical ideas of others.
• skills in critical reasoning.
• an ability to handle information and argument in a critical manner.
• information-technology skills such as word-processing and electronic data access information.
• organisation and time-management skills.

• Seminars: encourage peer-group discussion, enable students to develop critical skills in the close reading and analysis of texts, and skills of effective communication and presentation; promote awareness of diversity of interpretation and methodology.
• Consultation session: encourages students to reflect critically and independently on their work.
• Independent but directed reading in preparation for seminars provides opportunity for students to enrich subject-specific knowledge and enhances their ability to develop appropriate subject-specific skills.
• Typically, directed learning may include assigning student(s) an issue, theme or topic that can be independently or collectively explored within a framework and/or with additional materials provided by the tutor. This may function as preparatory work for presenting their ideas or findings (sometimes electronically) to their peers and tutor in the context of a seminar.
• Coursework: tests the student's ability to argue, respond and interpret, and to demonstrate subject-specific knowledge and skills such as appreciation of the power of imagination in literary creation and the close reading and analysis of texts; they also test the ability to present word-processed work, observing scholarly conventions. In individual Special Topics, the assessment may, where appropriate to the subject, take an alternative form, such as 'creative criticism'.
• Feedback: The written feedback that is provided after the first assessment allows students to reflect on examiners' comments, giving students the opportunity to improve their work for the second assessment.

Before Assessment 1, students have an individual 15 minute consultation session in which they are entitled to show their seminar leader a sheet of points relevant to the assessment and to receive oral comment on these points. Students may also if they wish, discuss their ideas for Assessment 2 at this meeting.

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