Introduction to British Culture

מבוא לתרבות אנגליה - II

Basic Course

Monday-Thursday 10:00-12:00

Semester II

Dr. Amy Garnai

Course Description

This course presents a survey of English literature and culture from the beginning of the eighteenth century until early twentieth-century modernism. We will read texts by the following authors: Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Dr. Johnson, William Blake, Charlotte Smith, Robert Burns, William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Lord Byron, PB Shelley, John Keats, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Gaskell, WB Yeats, Joseph Conrad, Oscar Wilde, T.S. Elliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. These include short novellas, extracts from longer prose works, short stories and both short and longer poems.  In doing so, we will examine literary periods such as the eighteenth century, Romanticism, the Victorian period and Modernism, the literary and cultural production that defined them and the historical developments that shaped and informed them. As such, we will reflect upon the interrelations between text, context and history as they appear in the canonical texts of British literature.

The lessons will be based on assigned texts that will be read before class. All texts will be available to download from the course website or through links to outside sources. The students may, of course, purchase used copies of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th volume, “The Major Authors”, from which most of the works are taken, or borrow from the library copies of individual texts.

Attendance is compulsory for this course, as per University regulations. Failure to attend regularly will result in the lowering of the class grade.

Assessment:

30% - midterm exam

60% - final exam

10% - attendance