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Course Details
| Summer 2013 | ENGL 607.1 | TTH | 6:00 - 8:40 | RH207 | JohnV Knapp | |
Title: TOPICS IN LITERATURECourse Description: Course devoted to the study of special topics and periods of literature. May be repeated to a maximum of 9 semester hours when topic varies.PRQ: | ||||||
| Detailed Course Description:This summer class will survey selected works by two giants of 20th century literature: James Joyce, the greatest stylist, and George Orwell, the supreme polemicist. In this brief 8-week summer course, we’ll take a look at selected fiction and essays by each, examining closely the texts they wrote, their ideas about style in literature, and, in the case of Orwell, the cognitive passions with which he saw culture, politics, and literature as inseparably intertwined. I also would like to take a look at their family systems, and the roles their wives played in their creativity (Joyce married once; Orwell twice). | ||||||
| Course Requirements:Course requirements will be met by completing assigned readings along with brief in-class reports, or response papers, and either, 1) a critical essay of ten pages or so, or 2) a four-to-five day lesson plan aimed at teaching either (or both) writer(s) to a secondary school or community college audience. | ||||||
| Required Texts:Likely texts to be read:
James Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; short stories from Dubliners; the play Exiles; selected criticism & Ellmann biographical info on the above, and Brenda Maddox, Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce (London, Minerva, 1989).
George Orwell, Coming Up for Air; Homage to Catalonia; and a selection from Collected Essays; selected criticism on the above, and Peter Davison, The Lost Orwell (Timewell, 2006), a discussion of Orwell's wives, Eileen Orwell and Sonia Brownell. Note: Students interested in reading only Joyce's magisterial Ulysses and Orwell's seldom- known The Clergyman's Daughter may make special arrangements with me. | ||||||
| Default Webboard Location: http://webboard.engl.niu.edu/default.asp?boardid=98 WebSite not set. Please contact Instructor for information. |
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