Prepares students to go into more advanced work in French by focusing on grammar, reading, writing, and oral practice. Besides intensive work in grammar, the study of texts provides the basis for discussion and composition, as well as the means of acquiring vocabulary and cultural insights.

Courses introduce students to French literature through the study of various genres: short story, poetry, novel, and theatre. Students improve their language skills through reading, writing, and discussion. As well, basic elements of French grammar are thoroughly reviewed and consolidated.

Focuses on one overarching theme: how Christian thought is embedded in some of the greatest literary classics of the Western World, selected from the Patristic period up to the twentieth century. These include such diverse genres as St. Augustine’s autobiographical ruminations in his Confessions; Dante’s Divine Comedy; Shakespeare’s Hamlet; Milton’s Paradise Lost; Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress; Goethe’s Faust; Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles; and T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. This course deals with questions such as: What are we referring to when we speak of the mind?

This course will provide an intensive study of significant works of ‘science fiction’ written between 1600 and 1900 from a literary historical perspective.

This course seeks to recover humanism as a central ethos of western culture and its Christian roots in two ways: first, by tracing, as much as possible, the story of humanism and its development from Christian roots to the Renaissance and to Postmodernity and its current “overcoming.” This historical exercise requires a counter narrative to the secularist master narrative that dominates both contemporary secular and Christian ideas of humanism.

This course offers a study of representative novels and novelists from nineteenth-century Britain. The novel as a genre flourished during this time, as the novel's form was shaped by writers such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontà«, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy.

The course examines representative selections of the poetry and prose of the high and late Renaissance period in England, covering a century from about 1580-1680, an era characterized by an impressive range of literary output that has never been rivaled in the western world.

Students study of seven representative plays (not covered in ENGL 551) of William Shakespeare and a selection of his sonnets. The Shakespearean works are read within the historically specific cultural context in which they were produced. The course pays particular attention to the way in which Shakespeare blurs generic, thematic, and ideological boundaries in his poetic and dramatic works — exploring his fusion of the tragic and the comic, the sacred and the profane, the noble and the plebeian, the fantastic and the historic, and the orthodox and the transgressive.

This course takes up the study of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Parliament of Fowls, and Legend of Good Women. Care is taken to develop a good reading knowledge of Chaucerian Middle English. The literary, social, economic, political, and spiritual principles in Chaucer’s texts, and the aesthetic techniques employed to shape them, will be situated within the historical and cultural contexts of Ricardian, or late fourteenth-century, England. Chaucer wrote for a populace that had confronted decimating plagues as well as social, economic, and religious upheaval.

A seminar in the reading and writing of literary nonfiction and in the development of a critical appreciation of its various forms. The course focuses on life writing in terms of its literary forms, as the authors’ responses to their culture, and as texts within which identity is shaped and altered by the intentional acts of their writers. Chosen texts demonstrate the art of life writing, as well as other paradigms for its interpretation and its literary and cultural influence.