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Literature CLEP English Literature CLEP
- Author Carolyn
- Creation date
ENGL101: Introduction to Literary Studies
By Saylor.org
Open Courseware
Self-paced
Workload: 130 hours
This course is comprised of a range of different free, online materials which will introduce you to the history and practice of English as a scholarly discipline with the goal of preparing you for your future endeavors as an English major. It has been designed to familiarize you with the various tools that scholars have devised in order to facilitate the study of literary expression in English, from critical frameworks to close reading techniques. After an introductory unit outlining basic approaches to literary analysis, we will embark upon a genre study, devoting each of the four remaining units to a different genre of writing: poetry, the novel, drama, the rhetorical essay, and the critical essay. In each of these units, we will review a general history of the genre, read a representative sample or set of samples, learn genre-specific critical terms and theories, and apply what you have learned to essays of your own. By the end of this course, you will have developed strategies that will enable you to understand, analyze, and critically respond to works in any genre at an advanced level.
Syllabus
ENGL301: Introduction to Literary Theory
By Saylor.org
Open Courseware
Self-paced
Workload: 240 hours
This course uses a range of different free, online resource materials that will introduce you to the field of literary theory, a central component of contemporary studies in English and world literature. As you progress through this course, you will gain knowledge of the various premises and methods available to you as a critical reader of literature. You will identify and engage with key questions that have animated - and continue to animate - theoretical discussions among literary scholars and critics, including issues pertaining to ideology, cultural value, the patriarchal and colonial biases of Western culture and literature, and more. The structure of this course is historically based, arranged as a genealogy of theoretical paradigms, beginning in the early 20th century - when literary theory first developed as a formal discipline - and following the evolution of literary theory into the present day. From text-centric Russian formalism to contemporary gynocriticism and trauma theory, you will explore the basic principles and preeminent texts that have defined many of the major critical debates surrounding literature over the past hundred years.
Syllabus
- Unit 1: What is Literary Theory?
- Unit 2: Form, Structure, and Signs
- Unit 3: Post-Structuralisms
- Unit 4: Feminism, Gender, and Queer Theory
- Unit 5: Marxism, Ideology, and Materialism
- Unit 6: Reader-Response Paradigms
- Unit 7: Context, Culture, and the Other
- Unit 8: Literary Theories in the New Century and Arguments against Literary Theory
- Final Exam, Answers
ENGL201: Medieval English Literature and Culture
By Saylor.org
Open Courseware
Self-paced
Workload: 137 hours
This course comprises a range of different free, online materials.
This survey course has been designed in order to introduce you to the very origins of literary expression in the English language. We will identify and examine the forms, genres, literary conventions, and topics of concern that typify medieval literature. Because all literary works are intertextual to some degree, we will begin to recognize the many relationships and discursive practices that these works share with other texts across centuries and around the globe. In recognition of the vast time range and large amount of material to be covered, this course will approach literature as a product of specific historical and cultural circumstances. To foster this understanding, this course has been divided into three chronological units: Anglo-Saxon England and Old English poetry; Anglo-Norman England and the Romances; and Middle English Literature. At the outset of each unit, we will explore the historical and cultural background of the period, and then we will read representative texts.
Syllabus
ENGL202: Cultural and Literary Expression in the English Renaissance
By Saylor.org
Open Courseware
Self-paced
This course comprises a range of different free, online materials.
At the outset of the 16th century, Europeans tended to dismiss English literature as inferior to continental literary traditions; the educated Englishman was obliged to travel to the continent and speak in other languages in order to “culture” himself. By the end of the Renaissance, however, some of the greatest works in the English language—from Shakespeare’s dramas to Thomas More’sUtopia—had been written. In this course, we will read and examine these works, situating them within their socio-historical and literary contexts, while attempting to determine how the art of English language and letters came into its own during this dynamic period. We will begin with an overview of European history during the centuries leading up to the Renaissance in order to acquaint ourselves with the profound cultural and social changes brought about by the Italian Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, nationalism/colonialism, and the growing power of the middle class. We will then embark upon a genre study, exploring various Renaissance-era achievements in poetry, drama, and polemical writing.
Syllabus
ENGL203: Cultural and Literary Expression in the 18th and 19th Centuries
By Saylor.org
Open Courseware
Self-paced
Workload: 136.5 hours
This course comprises a range of different free, online materials.
Scholars tend to label the period between the Renaissance and the modern era as the long 18th and 19th centuries, meaning that they span from around 1680 - 1830 and 1775 - 1910, respectively, and that so many literary movements and cultural changes took place during these interim years that a narrower title is difficult to come by. In this course, we will examine these formative cultural and literary developments chronologically, dividing the course into four roughly sequential periods: The Enlightenment and Restoration Literature; The Rise of the Novel; Romanticism; and the Victorian Period. We will identify and contextualize the principal characteristics of each of these movements/periods, reading representative texts and examining their relationship to those texts that preceded or were contemporaneous with them. As such, this course foregrounds the movement, the changes, and the continuities from the neoclassicism of authors such as John Dryden and Alexander Pope through the emergence of the novel in the writings of Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, and Samuel Richardson to the Romanticism of William Blake, William Wordsworth, and John Keats to the Victorian era developments of prose and poetry by writers such as Alfred Tennyson, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. At the same time, the course places these literary developments alongside the transformation of the English nation. Over the course of this period, the modern United Kingdom emerged. From a monarchical government, it shifted to a parliamentary democracy, as its borders expanded formally to include Scotland and as its empire grew to its height at the end of the 19th century. At the same time, the British Isles were the site of unprecedented social and economic upheaval through processes of industrialization and urbanization. Intellectually and philosophically, this era saw the emergence of modern science and the displacement, to a large extent, of Christianity and tradition as the foundations of truth. In a variety of ways, writers responded to and helped to spur and foster these changes that define modernity, and in the process of doing so, they helped to create literature as a new discipline distinct from yet parallel to religious, philosophical, and scientific pursuits.
Syllabus
ENGL204: Cultural and Literary Expression in Modernity
By Saylor.org
Open Courseware
Self-paced
Workload: 127 hours
This course is comprised of a range of different free, online materials.
From Friedrich Nietzsche’s shocking pronouncement in the late 1800s that “God is dead” and that “we have killed him” to Vladimir Nabokov’s convention-challenging fiction, the Modern period—spanning roughly the end of the 19th century to the present—offered a range of provocative and often cynical cultural and literary productions. In this course, we will work to develop a more nuanced understanding of the scope of cultural and literary expression in the late 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries and a working definition of what the vacuous-sounding term “modernism” might mean. We will attend to broad socio-historical happenings, from the birth of modernism in the late 19th century to the radical violence of the World Wars and the tragedy of the Holocaust and arrive at the post-modern moment, our post-colonial and technologically and economically globalized village. While offering this historical context, the course focuses on the cultural and literary movements from the “art for art’s sake” decadence of the late 1800s to the avant-garde experiments of the post-war period and beyond. In addition to literary “modernism,” the course will also take a brief look at the cultural production of “modernism” in art, music, architecture, cinema, philosophy, and drama. Yet, while the course will generally navigate late 19th and 20th century literature in the British tradition, framed by historical understanding and infused with an investigation of concomitant cultural production, we will end by briefly examining the increasingly global nature of postmodern culture, encountering the texts (and contexts) of Anglophone authors as diverse as India’s Arundhati Roy and Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe as well as taking a brief look at globalized, contemporary art and literature. Therefore, by the end of this course, we should have an advanced conceptualization of “modernism” and its many varied constructions, the major literary trends and cultural achievements of the late 19th and 20th centuries, and the socio-historical movements that shaped them, as well as an attentiveness to the impact that globalization currently has upon literature and cultural production.
Syllabus