Language is an
amazingly versatile technology. It sits inside our skulls, registering the
changes that we live through and helping us record them in all kinds of
differently useful ways.
In this course,
we’ll begin seeing that for ourselves with the help of three of those ways:
poetry, drama, and prose fiction. Specifically, we’ll be reading two novels and
two plays about people whose lives are changing, and we’ll use an anthology of
poetry to learn how to read slowly enough to notice what’s going on among the
words as they tell us their stories.
Texts: THE
NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF POETRY, shorter edition; Jane Austen, EMMA; Charles
Dickens, GREAT EXPECTATIONS; Shakespeare, HAMLET; Molière, TARTUFFE. Four
five-page papers, midterm, and final.