Iyengar, Sujata
TR 11:10 AM
Park Hall 144
This upper-division English Literature class investigates the poetry and poets that flourished during the Tudor dynasty and in particular during the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth (1533-1603), including Edmund Spenser's enormous English epic, The Faerie Queene (six books and two cantos, about a twenty-hour reading time, written in a self-consciously "difficult" style so that readers enounter and must conquer cognitive struggles of their own comparable to the protagonists' challenges with monsters, giants, femmes fatales, and other mythical creatures).
You don't have to like D&D, Star Wars, fantasy novels, The Crown, or writing poetry to get into The Faerie Queene, but it sure helps! Students in previous years have responded to this epic poem by making board- and card-games, writing contemporary poetry, writing short microtheme essays, and even comics.
While this class meets in person, it uses online synchronous and asynchronous tools generously, as appropriate to our learning; students will need to use eLC and Zoom to access some of the materials.
Texts:
BOOK (printed or electronic text is fine)
The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse -- used is fine, any edition is fine, as long as it is the one edited by H. WOUDHUYSEN and DAVID NORBROOK.
BOOK (printed or electronic text is fine)
The Faerie Queene, published by Longman -- again, used, rental, all is fine as long as it is the one edited by A.C. HAMILTON.
BOOK (you can read it for free online on The Poetry Foundation website, but it’s long enough that you might prefer a printed copy or an ebook)
The Defense of Poesy [also published as An Apologie for Poetry], by Sir Philip Sidney
FILM: Elizabeth, dir. Shekhar Kapur, available for viewing in the UGA Libraries and also available for purchase or rental from Amazon Prime.
What we do:
Students read texts, take quizzes, write journals, responses, analytical scholarly papers, reflective and creative individual or group assignments (including making posters or maps or cards), and engage in synchronous and asynchronous discussion in groups and as a class. You can expect to produce three major papers or projects (one of which might be a group project) and to complete at least one lower-stakes assignment every week.
Last year I tried contract grading, labor-based grading, or "ungrading" in my classes; you hated all of them, although they are considered "best practices" for undergraduate teaching. It seems that last year's students would have preferred traditional exams and did NOT want the chance to revise. So we'll talk about the grading scheme in the first few class meetings.
UNIT 0: SYLLABUS AND STUDY TIPS
UNIT 1: ELIZABETHAN CONTEXTS
UNIT 2: PERSONAL MORALITY
Sex, Love, and Friendship
UNIT 3: MORALITY AND SOCIETY