ADDITIONAL REQUIRED READING
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In this course you will be asked to read essays and illustrative material, some of which shall be distributed to you in class. A complete set of class notes and lectures will be ON RESERVE in the LRC (Library). (Refer to the shaded area on Page one of the syllabus.) THE OPEN COMPUTER LAB IS AVAILABLE FOR WWW REFERENCE, BUT, PLEASE NOTE:
You may read the essays on the screen, but you will be unable to run off copies of them; you may copy the disk, however, and use it on your home computer..
The best way, however, to read the documents, is download them and then print them.
The essays and background notes listed below offer you the core readings for English 2327. A combination of history, philosophny, and aesthetics, this information focuses on basic insights which will aid you in interpreting the primary works of our writers. The Reformation and the Renaissance, for example, which inform the second reading, "American Literature, Part I," places an emphasis on history and philosophy which form the springboard of our understanding of the European experience in America. Octavio Paz's essay, furthe, permits us to explore our own reactions to the art of the Pre-Columbian civilizaztions and lets us share the initial shock and other reactions our Spanish explorers must have experienced when they entered the New World. In order to react to the works of Highwater (Anpao) and Chavaria (Gabeza de Vaca) [the film] , Paz's essay offers us insight and comfort and helps us to celebrate "the Other". Again, in order to understand the eighteenth century, you have to know about the ideas of Scientific Deism and the full implications of The Age of Reason. So very different from today's points of view, this background gives us the essential philosophic and theologic foundations which informed the thinking of the Founding Fathers, especially Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin. You will, therefore, begin to appreciate their education and, thus, their assumptions which inform the central works of each writer.
Finally, the works of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthoirne, Melville, and Whitman move us into what is an American writer, and the specific attributes of a national literature emerge when we understand the theological and philosophical assumptions of the German Transcendentalists and the Romantic writers in England who heavily influenced Emerson among others. It is here that we can study the particular attributes of each writer and also, and as important, the universal ones. Thus, our study of comedy and tragedy and the epic will, bringing us back where began, so to speak, with an appreciation of the other in terms of our own experiences and reactions to the terrain of comedy, the soulscape of tragedy, and the vast panorama of the epic.
Required Readings Online, WWW Section and Non WWW Sections
1. Octavio Paz. "The Other" Essays in Mexican ArtTo Be Provided in Class
2. American Literature Part I, The Seventeenth Century
4. American Literature Part II, The Eighteenth Century and the Enlightenment
6. The Essays, "Tragic Form," "The Scarlet Letter,"and "Moby-Dick"Can Be Found by Clicking Here.
Click Here for IMPORTANT Information, "How to Use the Forum for English 2327 WWW Course"!