August Dear English Fresher

Transcription

1 From: Dr Corinna Russell Director of Studies in English (Part I) Emmanuel College August 2018 Dear English Fresher I am writing, first of all, to offer my congratulations to you on your exam results, and on confirming your place to read English at Emmanuel College. I am very much looking forward to meeting you again in October. I will be your Director of Studies for the first two years of your degree, which means that I will be responsible for organising and guiding your teaching during that time. I will meet you soon after your arrival at Emmanuel to explain the structure of the course, and the teaching that you will receive, but I thought you may wish to be reminded now that much of your first term s work will be on literature from 1830 to 1945 (Paper 7a of Part I of the English Tripos). I will be your supervisor for work on this paper, together with Helen Charman, a graduate researching in this period. If you haven t already begun some preliminary reading for the year ahead, it would be a good idea to start now. Cambridge terms are short and busy, and you will find it difficult to give yourself the time to read the longer texts once term has started. I am attaching an updated reading list, and you are encouraged to read as widely as possible from the primary works indicated. If you have any questions at all about any of this, or about anything else to do with your teaching, please feel free to get in touch with me (cr215@cam.ac.uk). Otherwise, I look forward to meeting you all at the start of the new academic year. With best wishes Yours sincerely, Corinna Russell

2 Emmanuel College: English STUDY Full details of the content of all the courses here are available on the Departmental and Faculty websites: Teaching is shared between the University, which provides formal instruction i.e. lectures and classes and the College which, through its Directors of Studies, organises individual teaching by College Supervisors. In addition to arranging supervisions, Directors of Studies are available to offer advice on the choice of courses and options, and generally follow the academic progress of undergraduates in their subject. Any prospective undergraduate with queries in the coming months connected specifically with his or her course of study should contact the appropriate Director of Studies for advice. ENGLISH To students coming up to Emmanuel in 2018: We are looking forward to welcoming you to the College in October. It may be useful, in the time before you arrive, to start to orient yourself by means of a few important primary texts, as well as a few landmarks in the criticism of literature. The following suggestions are not intended as a definitive survey of the terrain; neither are you expected to have covered all the ground they indicate before you arrive at Emmanuel. We do, however, recommend that you start to get a sense of where your first three terms will take you, and begin to prepare for the work that lies ahead. Cambridge terms are short (eight weeks), and the reading that you will be required to cover is not always easy to fit into the time available. You will probably enjoy the process more if you are not reading all your primary texts for the first time when preparing a weekly essay. The three terms of your first year will each cover a broad chronological period in the history of literature in English. In your first term (Michaelmas), you will be working through literature from the early Victorian period to the Second World War and just after. In your second (Lent term), you will be studying the literature and ideas of the English Renaissance. The third (Easter) term will be dedicated to the works of Shakespeare. You will in all probability find that your supervisor (teacher) for each paper will set you one essay task or other form of written exercise a week, for which you will be required to read at least one major work by the author in question, as well as relevant secondary or critical material. Sometimes, as you progress through the course, you will be asked in advance to select authors or texts that you wish to write on. This schedule can be demanding, especially if you are reading long texts for the first time. In order to get some sense of what will be involved, we have included an outline syllabus for Michaelmas term, and some pointers towards key reading for the two following terms. The emphasis in your preparations should fall on primary texts, but examples of useful secondary criticism are included in case you do have access to a good local library or can easily acquire books secondhand. These are, emphatically, indicative rather than compulsory at this stage. Bear in mind that opportunities for borrowing many more works of criticism will be plentiful once you arrive. 2

3 Michaelmas Term: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literature (paper 7a of Part I) The following outline is not carved in stone, but is intended to give you a sense of how work in this very broad period might be organised. Week 1: Narratives of Selfhood Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (in an edition with good notes, such as Penguin, Norton, or Oxford World s Classics) Frederick Douglas, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, an American Slave, Written by Himself, edited by William L. Andrews and William S. McFeely (Norton Critical Edition) Week 2: Tennyson and Post-Romantic Lyric Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Selected Edition, edited by Christopher Ricks (Longman: 1969; 1989). Read as much as possible of In Memoriam A.H.H; The Lotos Eaters ; Mariana ; The Lady of Shallott ; Ulysses ; The Two Voices ; Tiresias ; Break, break, break ; lyrics from The Princess [e.g. The Splendour falls on Castle Walls, Now sleeps the crimson petal, Tears, idle tears ]; Recommended website: [especially the Sounding Tennyson project] Week 3: Poetics of the Nineteenth-Century Novel George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859). Any edition. Of possible interest: Week 4: Romance, Boyhood and Empire Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883) in e.g. the Oxford World s Classics edition Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). There are various good editions, including Penguin and Oxford, but the Norton edition includes some useful secondary material. Week 5: Lyric and Language at the Turn of the Century Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Major Works, [poems and selected prose] ed. by Catherine Phillips (Oxford World s Classics, 2009) Thomas Hardy, selections from Poems of

4 Week 6: Modernist Sappho Selections to be provided, including poems by Swinburne, H.D., Pound, and Amy Lowell. Week 7: Experiments in Art and Fiction Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927) Week 8: Late Modernist Poetry T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (1943). Faber edition if possible. Basil Bunting, Briggflatts (Bloodaxe) Bunting/dp/ Lent Term and Easter Term: Renaissance Literature and Shakespeare It would be very helpful if you could read some of the following before you arrive: Spenser: Faerie Queene (at least the first two books), and The Shepherd s Calendar Sir Philip Sidney: his Arcadia is long and important (it has some claims to being the first prose romance in English); his sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella offers an interesting courtly alternative to Shakespeare s sequence. His Defence of Poesy is an interesting piece of early literary criticism, which you are encouraged to read, even if you don t manage the longer works before you arrive. Thomas More, Utopia (1516) Ben Jonson: read as many of the plays and poems as you can. Metaphysical Poets: read as much as you can of the poetry of Donne, Herbert and Marvell, together with Vaughan and Crashaw. There is an old but trusty Penguin selection edited by Helen Gardner: The Metaphysical Poets. Milton: Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, Comus and Lycidas Drama: read as much as you can of Marlowe, Webster, Kyd and Congreve, and Aphra Behn. Most of the above are available in good and inexpensive paperback editions published by Penguin or Oxford University Press. For single authors, the Oxford Authors series contains generous selections of the key writings, and can be recommended. 4

5 Contexts A select list of some useful background works: Boris Ford, ed.: The Age of Shakespeare (New Pelican Guide Vol 2) Christopher Ricks, ed.: English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, excluding drama (Oxford History of Eng. Lit. Vol 3) Isobel Rivers: Classical and Christian Ideas in Renaissance Poetry Gary Waller: English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century Julia Briggs: This Stage-Play World: English Literature and its background Graham Parfitt: English Poetry in the Seventeenth Century Shakespeare Read as many plays as you can, together with the Sonnets. Decent editions include the paperbacks published by Oxford, New Arden, and New Cambridge. The best one-volume editions are probably The Riverside Shakespeare ed. G Blakemore Evans et al., and the Oxford Complete Works ed. Gary Taylor & Stanley Wells. The following are provocative introductions to questions of interpretation and performance which are (mostly) available in paperback: Raymond Williams: Drama in Performance C L Barber: Shakespeare s Festive Comedy William Empson: Essays on Shakespeare, and several chapters in The Structure of Complex Words Barbara Everett: Young Hamlet: Essays on Shakespeare s Tragedies Stephen Greenblatt: Shakespearian Negotiations and Renaissance Self-Fashioning Stephen Orgel: Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare s England Gary Taylor: Reinventing Shakespeare Terence Hawkes: Meaning by Shakespeare 5

6 Further Reading If you can, now would be an excellent opportunity to read some of the works which are not themselves part of English Literature, but without which there would be very little literature at all. Again, a summary list might include: The Bible (especially Genesis, Exodus, the Gospels, Ecclesiastes, The Book of Job, Revelation, 1 Corinthians; all in the King James translation) Ovid, Metamorphoses Dante, Commedia (The Divine Comedy) Homer, Iliad & Odyssey Sappho, perhaps in translation by Anne Carson Virgil, Aeneid, Eclogues Horace, Odes Many students find it helpful to extricate themselves from A-level ways of working by reading something which asks large questions even of small books such as How do we read? ; Why do we read? ; and so on. A tentative familiarity with philosophy could be useful here (there are many short paperback introductions to philosophy available), as could reading one of the paperbacks on the literary theory reading list which follows. With all of these suggestions, you may well find it more helpful to scribble notes/questions as you read, either in a notebook, or [if it is your own copy] in the books themselves. Literary Theory and Literary Practise The following are readily available in paperback. Eric Auerbach, Mimesis David Lodge, ed.: Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader and Twentieth Century Literary Criticism: A Reader Nicholas Royle & Andrew Bennett: An Introduction to Literature, Criticism, and Theory Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation Raman Selden: Practising Theory and Reading Literature M H Abrams: A Glossary of Literary Terms If, in the time before you arrive, you have any queries about reading and general preparation, do get in touch with me by , on cr215@cam.ac.uk. I wish you all a happy and productive remains of the Summer, Dr Corinna Russell Director of Studies in English, Part I Emmanuel College August