Course Outline:
Week 1: Orientation, introduction to the course. What is Literature?
Week 2&3: Approaching Fiction: plot, character, and theme.
1. The Parable of the Prodigal Son
2. Ernest Hemingway: Cat in the Rain
3. Kate Chopin: Desiree’s Baby, The Story of an Hour
4. In-class essay (1 and 2)
Week 4&5: Narrative Point of View, Allegory and Symbolism.
1. Alice Walker: Everyday Use
2. Edgar Allan Poe: The Cask of Amontillado
3. In-class essay 3
Week 6: Approaching Poetry
1. Langston Hughes: Harlem
2. John Keats: Ode on a Grecian Urn
Week 7: Tone, Figurative Language
1. Robert Herrick:To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
2. Thomas Hardy: The Man He Killed
3. e.e.cummings: next to of course god America
4. Sylvia Plath: Metaphors
5. Alfred Tennyson: The Eagle
6.William Carlos Williams: The Red Wheelbarrow
7. Dickinson: Because I Could not Stop for Death
Week 8 &9: Imagery and Symbolism, Irony
1. Ezra Pound: In a Station of a Metro
2. Percy Shelley: Ozymandias.
3. Andrew Marvel: To His Coy Mistress
4. John Donne: Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
5. Selections from Robert Frost’s poetry
In-class essay (4)
Week10&11: Approaching Drama
Tragedy: Arthur Miller: Tragedy and the Common Man
Henrik Ibsen: A Doll’s House
Week 12&13: Criticism
Week 14: Things resolved and unresolved
Final Exam.