British Literature Class Notes -- Week 2 (January 28)

Greetings!

We had a marvelous class this week.  I was especially pleased with the questions that the students brought to class.  As they read their assigned portions of Beowulf, they were to think of questions that would help us analyze this piece of ancient literature.  

Every class time I will take their questions and put them up on the board.  Many of the questions will have similar themes, so we will answer them in groups.  In our discussion this week, we talked about parallels to Biblical events and to current events.  I took a couple of photos of the white board full of our questions and related notes.  

Assignment for Next Week:

-- Read History of English Literature (III)

-- Read Beowulf (p. 30 - 57)

-- 3 Discussion Questions

Links for this Week:

Class Notes

Beowulf in Poetic form

Seamus Heaney's Beowulf audiobook, Part 1

Seamus Heaney's Beowulf audiobook, Part 2

Have a great week!

Mrs. Prichard

British Literature Class Notes -- Week 1 (January 21)

Greetings!

It's great to be back at CHAT.  British Literature is one of my favorite classes to teach, and I've got a great group of students to teach this semester.  We have a small class, only 4 students, but I know we'll have great discussions in this class.

We started the class with a look at the syllabus.  We'll be reading Beowulf, Much Ado about Nothing, Great Expectations, Romantic poetry, Victorian poetry, Pygmalion, and The 39 Steps.  As I told the students, the bulk of the work of this class will reading, with very little writing.  Each week, students are to read the assigned portion and to bring discussion questions for the class.

We also took some time at the white board brainstorming about what makes a novel a good book.  We had the categories of Characters, Setting, Plot, and Meaning.  We also listed our favorite books and discussed how they qualified as "good books."

Finally, we started into Beowulf, reading the first 2 short sections.

Assignments for Next Week:

-- Read p. 1 - 30 of Beowulf

-- Write 3 Discussion Questions

-- Read sections I and II of the History of British Literature

Links for this week:

Syllabus

Beowulf responds to Unferth

History of Literature, I & II

Have a great weekend!

Mrs. Prichard

British Literature Syllabus, Spring 2016

	Literature Reading Assignment Due this Week	Writing Assignment Due this Week
Week 1 (1/21)	Brief timeline of British History; Introduce Beowulf
Week 2 (1/28)	Discuss Beowulf;	Read History of English Literature (I & II) Read p. 1 – 30; 3 Discussion Questions
Week 3 (2/4)	Discuss Beowulf; Introduce Much Ado About Nothing	Read History of English Literature (III) Read p. 30 – 57; 3 Discussion Questions
Week 4 (2/11)	Discuss Much Ado About Nothing	Read History of English Literature (IV) Read Acts I, II & III; 3 Discussion Questions
Week 5 (2/18)	Discuss Much Ado About Nothing Introduce Great Expectations	Read Acts IV & V; 3 Discussion Questions Read History of English Literature (VII)
No CHAT
Week 6 (3/3)	Discuss Great Expectations	Read p. 1 – 96; 3 Discussion Questions
Week 7 (3/10)	Discuss Great Expectations	Read p. 96 – 191; 3 Discussion Questions
Week 8 (3/17)	Discuss Great Expectations	Read p. 191 – 286; 3 Discussion Questions
Week 9 (3/24)	Discuss Great Expectations; Introduce Poetry	Read p. 286 – 380; 3 Discussion Questions
No CHAT
Week 10 (4/7)	Discuss Poetry (Romantic & Metaphysical Poets)	Read History of English Literature (VI) Poetry selections TBD; 3 Discussion Questions
Week 11 (4/14)	Discuss Poetry (Victorian Poets); Introduce Pygmalion	Read History of English Literature (VII) Poetry selections TBD; 3 Discussion Questions
Week 12 (4/21)	Discuss Pygmalion	Read Acts I, II & III; 3 Discussion Questions
Week 13 (4/28)	Discuss Pygmalion; Introduce 39 Steps	Read Acts IV & V; 3 Discussion Questions
Week 14 (5/5)	Discuss 39 Steps	Read p. 1 – 42; 3 Discussion Questions
Week 15 (5/12)	Discuss 39 Steps	Read p. 43 – 88; 3 Discussion Questions Reflection Paper

BEOWULF RESPONDS TO UNFERTH

Beowulf answered, offspring of Ecgtheow:

“My good friend Unferth, sure freely and wildly,

O friend Unferth, you are fuddled with beer, and cannot talk coherently.

Thou fuddled with beer of Breca hast spoken,

Hast told of his journey! A fact I allege it,

That greater strength in the waters I had then,

Ills in the ocean, than any man else had.

We made agreement as the merest of striplings

Promised each other (both of us then were

We simply kept an engagement made in early life.

Younkers in years) that we yet would adventure

Out on the ocean; it all we accomplished.

While swimming the sea-floods, sword-blade unscabbarded

Boldly we brandished, our bodies expected

To shield from the sharks. He sure was unable

He could not excel me, and I would not excel him.

To swim on the waters further than I could,

More swift on the waves, nor would I from him go.

Then we two companions stayed in the ocean

After five days the currents separated us.

Five nights together, till the currents did part us,

The weltering waters, weathers the bleakest,

And nethermost night, and the north-wind whistled

Fierce in our faces; fell were the billows.

The mere fishes’ mood was mightily ruffled:

And there against foemen my firm-knotted corslet,

Hand-jointed, hardy, help did afford me;

My battle-sark braided, brilliantly gilded,

A horrible sea-beast attacked me, but I slew him. 55

Lay on my bosom. To the bottom then dragged me,

A hateful fiend-scather, seized me and held me,

Grim in his grapple: ’twas granted me, nathless,

To pierce the monster with the point of my weapon,

My obedient blade; battle offcarried

The mighty mere-creature by means of my hand-blow.

History of English Literature, Parts I & II

I. Introduction
English Literature, literature produced in England, from the introduction of Old English by the Anglo-Saxons in the 5th century to the present. The works of those Irish and Scottish authors who are closely identified with English life and letters are also considered part of English literature
            This period extends from about 450 to 1066, the year of the Norman-French conquest of England. The Germanic tribes from Europe who overran England in the 5th century, after the Roman withdrawal, brought with them the Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, language, which is the basis of Modern English. They brought also a specific poetic tradition, the formal character of which remained surprisingly constant until the termination of their rule by the Norman-French invaders six centuries later.

II.  Old English
A. Poetry
             Much of Old English poetry was probably intended to be chanted, with harp accompaniment, by the Anglo-Saxon scop, or bard. Often bold and strong, but also mournful and elegiac in spirit, this poetry emphasizes the sorrow and ultimate futility of life and the helplessness of humans before the power of fate. Almost all this poetry is composed without rhyme, in a characteristic line, or verse, of four stressed syllables alternating with an indeterminate number of unstressed ones. This line strikes strangely on ears habituated to the usual modern pattern, in which the rhythmical unit, or foot, theoretically consists of a constant number (either one or two) of unaccented syllables that always precede or follow any stressed syllable. Another unfamiliar but equally striking feature in the formal character of Old English poetry is structural alliteration, or the use of syllables beginning with similar sounds in two or three of the stresses in each line.
            All these qualities of form and spirit are exemplified in the epic poem Beowulf written in the 8th century. Beginning and ending with the funeral of a great king, and composed against a background of impending disaster, it describes the exploits of a Scandinavian cultural hero, Beowulf, in destroying the monster Grendel, Grendel's mother, and a fire-breathing dragon. In these sequences Beowulf is shown not only as a glorious hero but as a savior of the people. The Old Germanic virtue of mutual loyalty between leader and followers is evoked effectively and touchingly in the aged Beowulf's sacrifice of his life and in the reproaches heaped on the retainers who desert him in this climactic battle. The extraordinary artistry with which fragments of other heroic tales are incorporated to illumine the main action, and with which the whole plot is reduced to symmetry, has only recently been fully recognized.
            Another feature of Beowulf is the weakening of the sense of the ultimate power of arbitrary fate. The injection of the Christian idea of dependence on a just God is evident. That feature is typical of other Old English literature, for almost all of what survives was preserved by monastic copyists. Most of it was actually composed by religious writers after the early conversion of the people from their faith in the older Germanic divinities.
            Sacred legend and story were reduced to verse in poems resembling Beowulf in form. At first such verse was rendered in the somewhat simple, stark style of the poems of Caedmon, a humble man of the late 7th century who was described by the historian and theologian Saint Bede the Venerable as having received the gift of song from God. Later the same type of subject matter was treated in the more ornate language of the Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf and his school. The best of their productions is probably the passionate “Dream of the Rood.”
            In addition to these religious compositions, Old English poets produced a number of more or less lyrical poems of shorter length, which do not contain specific Christian doctrine and which evoke the Anglo-Saxon sense of the harshness of circumstance and the sadness of the human lot. “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer” are among the most beautiful of this group of Old English poems.

British Literature -- Spring Grades

This British Literature class was a great pleasure for me.  Not only did I get to re-read some of my favorite pieces of literature, but I had the opportunity to discuss and “unpack” these with a wonderful group of students.  Each week they came prepared; not only had they read the sometimes challenging material, but they had insightful discussion questions that we used as a group to explore deeper meanings in the novels, poetry, and dramatic works; they all contributed to our discussions and added many perceptive opinions.

Because this class required a lot of reading, I didn’t assign any writing assignments.  At the beginning of the semester, I modeled the kind of discussion questions that would help us examine the assigned readings.  After those initial weeks, the students themselves were assigned to bring in questions for the class to consider and explore.   Some days, we had so many discussion questions that we couldn’t get through all of them. 

Their grades are then somewhat subjective.  This was not a class in which a student could sit back, not read the assignments, and refuse to participate.  A small class like this demanded much more interaction.  I don’t have any percentages or specific scores to use to determine a letter grade; however, as I considered each student’s grade for the semester, I asked myself these questions:

·         Did he/she come to class having read the assigned portions?  Could I tell the student’s comprehension via his/her comments and participation?

·         Did he/she bring thoughtful and insightful questions for the class to discuss?

·         Did he/she think carefully over the discussion questions and share individual comments?

·         Was he/she resistant to participating in the discussions?

·         Over the course of the class, did he/she grow in his/her abilities to analyze fiction, poetry, and drama?

Each of the students did marvelously, and my suggested grade for each is an “A.”  I hope they enjoyed the class as much as I did.   If they ever need some ideas for more good British literature to read, I’d be more than glad to help them find more good books, drama, or poetry to read.

British Literature Class Notes -- Week 15 (May 7)

Greetings!

We had a wonderful final class for our British Literature class.  We finished our last reading selection, The 39 Steps by John Buchan.  While the book is full of implausibilities, the action of the plot made it a fun read.  One student expressed the wish that it would make a great longer book with more of the details filled in. 

We only took about a third of our class time to discuss the book because I had planned a final exam.  I had written last week that it would be a Bingo game.  I lied.  It was a Jeopardy game instead.  (You can go here and play it for yourselves.)  The students did well and were rewarded with prizes.  

There was some confusion about the Reflection Papers.  In my other classes, I had the students write their reflections as part of the class.  If any of the students didn't write one, they can write one and e-mail it to me.  

My goal is to have grades out by next Thursday.  I have to say that this is one of my favorite classes to teach. This year's group of students were especially loquacious, making the class discussions fascinating.

Assignments for Next Week:

-- ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!!!

Links for this week:

Class Notes

Jeopardy Game

Have a wonderful summer!

Mrs. Prichard