ENGL 227
Elegies Fall 2023
Division I Writing Skills

Class Details

This tutorial explores elegies as a literary genre. In their most familiar form, elegies honor and memorialize the dead. More broadly conceived, the genre includes works lamenting other kinds of loss as well: the loss of a lover, place, country, or cherished version of one’s past. We’ll consider the special challenges and opportunities of the elegiac voice: how it manages to give public expression to private grief; negotiates problems of tone and perspective; worries about and celebrates the capacity of language to generate hope and consolation; and seeks a kind of solace in the literary effort to evoke, preserve, or rewrite a lost life or an absent past. This course focuses primarily on poetry, English and American, across a broad historical range. We’ll first read poems from 1600-1900–including works by Jonson, Milton, Donne, Dryden, Gray, Shelley, Tennyson, and Whitman, and then turn to some of the twentieth-century’s great poetic elegists–Wilfred Owen, W.B.Yeats, W.H.Auden, Robert Lowell, and Seamus Heaney. Finally, we’ll consider how the elegiac voice works in fiction, especially in stories by James Joyce (“The Dead”) and Vladimir Nabokov (“Spring in Fialta”).
The Class: Format: tutorial
Limit: 10
Expected: 10
Class#: 1824
Grading: no pass/fail option, no fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: Active participation in tutorial meetings. Students will write a 4- to 5-page paper every other week (five in all), and comment on their partners' papers in alternate weeks
Prerequisites: a 100-level ENGL course, or a score of 5 on the AP English Literature exam, or a score of 6 or 7 on the Higher Level IB English exam, or permission of the instructor.
Enrollment Preferences: Sophomores, but juniors and seniors are also welcome.
Distributions: Division I Writing Skills
WS Notes: All tutorials (at least in English) are by definition Writing Skills courses. Students will write either the main paper or a response critique in alternate weeks. Students will also have the opportunity to revise.
Attributes: ENGL Literary Histories B

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  • ENGL 227 - T1 (F) TUT Elegies
    ENGL 227 - T1 (F) TUT Elegies
    Division I Writing Skills
    Cancelled
    1824
    Cancelled

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