Prof. Maria-Ana Tupan.

Literature and Culture. 1st and 2nd. Semesters. This is a one-year-undergraduate-level overview of British literature in key texts, with lectures focusing on issues of present interest in the construction of theoretical models for freshmen studying literature: a) the negotiations between literary texts and other discourses of the age (social, scientific, political, philosophical) as contexts of culture; b) epistemological frames and tropes supporting the idea of cultural dialogue: students will get accustomed to juxtaposing writings from different literary periods or "schools" and discussing them comparatively; c) aspects of genre, intertextuality, authority structures, gendered, classed and raced representations; d) historically shifting conditions of production and reception and their impact on literary form and structure (including the politics of canon formation). The course will be chronological, but it will re-examine the period terms from the positions constructed by the new literary history, which realigns history and aesthetics, exploring the way style develops as an indicator of historical change in the negotiations between culture, history and aesthetics. When looked at in light of Brian McHale's classification of literary histories in his book, Constructing Postmodernism, this is a narrative type of literary history (it constructs a canon on the basis of some legitimating story), and the methods is culturalist (literature is being considered as part of the entire cultural manifold of the age). Our legitimating story pivots on the construction of historical world-models and, consequently, of the conventions of repersenting that human individuality which sums up in itself the summum bonum (what a society considers to be of utmost value) which is called a hero in the world and a literary character in a text.

I. The Anglo-Saxon Age. From aristeia to aristobios during the heroic age. . Niggers in Space, with Lasers . The orally composed epic fixed in writing by Christian monks. . The heroic versus the elegiac assessment of life. . Generic types (courtly epic, elegies, scriptural and devotional poetry, dream vision, allegorical bestiary, aphoristic and gnomic kinds, historiography).

II. Late mediaeval literature. A medieval lover's discourse. The code of chivalry. Versions of the Christian pilgrim. . Metrical romances and the Harley Lyrics. . Religious drama (mystery/miracle and morality plays). . The generic medley. From Court and Church to Inn and Road. Social subversion versus hierarchical location in Chaucer.

III. Humanism and Reformation. The hero of the "eye, sword and tongue". The courtier as scholar, warrior and poet. . The London Reformers: Collet, Morus, Erasmus, Vives. The Renaissance utopian project at both ends of the century: More and Bacon. . Early Tudor drama. . The revival of ancient literary kinds and continental borrowings ushering in the Renaissance: the first sonneteers. High Renaissance (The Elizabethan Age). . Cultural and racial conflicts of the early modernity (Marlowe, Shakespeare). . Sonnet sequences (Samuel Daniel, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare). . Courtly epic (The Faerie Queene). . Formal and rhetorical aspects of Renaissance drama. . Shakespearean negotiations with other discourses (Erasmus, Morus, Bacon, Montaigne, Machiavelli, Edward Hall, Pollydore Vergil, Lipsius, the new scientific theories, political discourses, sermons etc.) of the age. . Shakespeare's generic innovations (histories, chronicle plays, dark comedies, romances, construction of plots and characters, mixture of verse, prose, music, choreography etc.). The The Century of Revolutions. . The metaphysical and the neoclassic schools of poetry in the 17th century.

. John Milton's use of genre and his imaginative refashioning of the Civil War.

IV. THE NEOCLASSIC AGE, or the Age of Reason. The Restoration scene and the onset of the Augustan Age. . Court versus City. Restoration comedy. Aphra Behn, the first professional woman writer. . The neoclassic poetics of John Dryden and Alexander Pope. . Characteristic literary kinds: satire, pamphlet, praise and descriptive poetry, argumentative poetry (philosophical and poetic epistles), character progress, mock-heroic, travelogue, periodical essay. . Plot and character from Defoe to Fielding. Novel versus romance ? The Post-Augustan Age: an age of sensibility. . The poetry and fiction of sentiment. . The rise of the Gothic novel, or a sense of an ending (of the "ancien regime", of Augustan ideology and of the Enlightenment trust in reason and the civilizing mission).

V. The Romantics. A hero of the imagination. . Bearings of the French Revolution ideology upon British fiction: the polarisation of the literary scene between Jacobins and anti-Jacobins. Romantic drama, or the anatomy of passions. . Romantic poetics. Blake: "Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds". William Wordsworth: Preface to Lyrical Ballads. Coleridge: Biographia Literaria (Chap. 13). . . Blake: mythology politically revised. Wordsworth: the myth of the developmental self. Coleridge: "clerisy", or the social energies of Romantic aesthetics. . Late Romantic anarchists: Shelley and Byron. Keats, or the order of aesthteic objects. The politics of late Gothic fiction: M. Shelley and J. Hogg.

2nd Semester

VI. The Victorian Age. The homo faber of the positivist age and his counters. . Periodisation. Positivism as the self-awareness of the alienated society. . Formal features: the generic hybrids of poetry, the end of closure, omniscience and monologism in fiction, as epistemological-stylistic symptoms of metaphysical crisis. . Victorian essayists: conservatists, radicals, cultural phenomenologists, aesthetes,. . Paradigms of Victorian poetry: The poetry of sensation. The poetics of the grotesque and the technique of the dramatic monologue. Hellenism and Decadence. . Fictional kinds: historical novel, Bildungsroman, realist novel, fantasy, Gothic and impressionist novel. . Victorian representations of gender, class, and race.

VII. Modernism. The hero as artist. . Civilization and its discontents: Conrad, Lawrence and Forster mounting up a resistance to the repressive policies of family, society and Empire.The narrative of the decaying West: Yeats, Shaw, Eliot, Joyce. . Structural devices of modernist poetry and fiction, inspired by recent developments in science, psychology and phylosophy: Woolf, Joyce, Eliot. . The thirties and early forties, or the new voices of concern: Greene, Waugh, Orwell, Huxley, Auden.

VIII. Postmodernism, or the World without a Hero. From Self to Other, from World to Text, from Author to Scriptor. . Existentialism and its aesthetic effects: Becket, Murdoch, Fowles. . Deconstructing Genesis: the unmaking of the world through the word, or the death of the world and the birth of discourse: scriptors and bricoleurs, alternative worlds, the abyss of subjectivity: Fowles, Ackroyd, Graham Swift, Crace, Hughes.The abyss of textuality, or re-writing wrong: Golding, Stoppard. . Postmodernist identities. Reverse colonization (the Empire within Britain): Naipaul, Ishiguro, Dabydeen, Rushdie, Phillips. Rebellious others within Britain: Heaney, Harrison.

Set Reading *:

Beowulf The Wanderer. The Seafarer C. Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (The General Prologue, and one tale). Christopher Marlowe: The Tragic History of the Life and Death of Dr Faustus William Shakespeare: Sonnets. The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Measure for Measure, The Tragedy of King Richard II, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, The Tempest. John Donne: The Sun-Rising, To His Mistress Going to Bed. John Milton: Paradise Lost (A) John Dryden: Alexander's Feast. Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Locke. The Dunciad. Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's Travels Henry Fielding: Tom Jones Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto William Blake: The Lamb, The Black Boy, The Bard, The Tyger. Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice .Northanger Abbey. Mansfield Park. William Wordsworth: Intimations of Immortality, Tintern Abbey S.T. Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan.

P. B. Shelley: Ozymandias G. G. Byron: Childe Harold (A). John Keats: Ode on a Grecian Urn Mary Shelley: Frankenstein.

A. Tennyson: Marianna: The Lady of Shalott, Ulysses. R. Browning: My Last Duchess, The Bishop Orders His Tomb, Fra Lippo Lippi.(Protus). Charles Dickens: Great Expectations. David Copperfield, Barnaby Rudge, Bleak House.. Charlotte Bront: Jane Eyre Emily Bront: Wuthering Heights George Eliot: Middlemarch. D. G. Rossetti: The Blessed Damozel. William Morris: The Defence of Guenevere G. M. Hopkins: Pied Beauty, The Windhover Ch. A. Swinburne: The Garden of Proserpine R.L. Stevenson: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde Lewis Carroll: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Thomas Hardy: Tess of the Durbervilles. Jude the Obscure W.H. Pater: Preface and Conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray. Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness. W.B. Yeats: The Second Coming, Sailing to Byzantium, Among Schoolchildren.

T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land E. M. Forster: A Passage to India George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four. Aldous Huxley: Brave New World V. Woolf: (Mrs. Dalloway. To the Lighthouse.) The Waves. James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ulysses William Golding: Lord of the Flies John Fowles: The French Lieutenant's Woman. Peter Ackroyd: Chatterton Graham Swift: Out of This World. V.S. Naipaul: The Mimic Men. S. Rushdie: Shame. K. Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day David Dabydeen: The Intended Ted Hughes: Crow Seamus Heaney: Punishment. Digging Tony Harrisson: THEM &/ UZ

Harold Pinter: The Caretaker. Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

* The titles in regular type are optional.

Critical Reference (optional)

All Cambridge Companions (to English Renaissance Drama, to Shakespeare Studies, to Milton, to English Restoration Theatre, etc.) Norman Vance: Irish Literature. A Social History. Basil Blackwell 1990 Marshall Walker: Scottish Literature Since 1707, Longman 1996. Idem: British Literature. An Overview . Part I, II, E.U.B. 2005 Idem:The New Literary History. E.U.B., 2006.