This is the nuts-and-bolts, informative section, providing information such as what materials are needed, and how the assignments and marking are arranged. Please read it carefully.
Print materials
In addition to this Course Guide, your print materials will include your study units for the course, your set texts and references, the Assignment File and the Presentation Schedule.
This course has eight study units, each with activities and self-tests designed to help you work on what you are reading. Answers are suggested, but please do the activities and self-tests before consulting the answers. Useful supplementary readings and websites are also provided, from which you will be asked to read selected pages.
Now look at the outline of the study units below:
Study units
Unit 1: Drama and poetry as genres
This unit introduces you to drama and to poetry as literary genres which are sometimes but not always connected. Drama before the last century was often written in verse. Different forms of drama will be noted as well as a selection of the most common forms of poetry. This will provide us with a basic context for the plays and poems encountered in the units that follow. We briefly consider Aristotle's idea of tragedy and of dramatic structure.
Unit 2: Greek tragedy: Oedipus the King
Classical Greek drama, through a study of Oedipus the King, will be discussed in Unit 2, because it is the earliest western drama that has been very influential on later dramatists.
The unit offers us a brilliant dramatic text that has fascinated western audiences for many centuries. It can conveniently be divided into 'scenic units' which are the basic building blocks of dramatic scenes and, in later drama, what editors have called 'acts'. We shall consider Oedipus as a tragic hero trapped by fate or 'dike' and refer to Aristotle's idea of tragedy.
Unit 3: Shakespearean comedy: A Midsummer Night's Dream
This unit briefly introduces students to ideas about Shakespearean tragedy and history plays before studying his comedy and the rich sexual fantasy in the comic view of life found in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Comedy as a dramatic form in Western drama, like tragedy, may be traced back to Greece. It was developed in the Roman theatres and later emerged in the Italian comedies and farces that influenced French and English drama. Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream is a comedy that includes farcical elements and rich fantasy to explore human imagination and sexuality.
Unit 4: Drama of ideas: George Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man
This unit introduces you to the drama of ideas most famously associated with the major Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen. George Bernard Shaw, directly influenced by Ibsen in his own plays, publicized the Norwegian among the British public and writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Arms and the Man will be read as a comedy of ideas relevant to its times and social context. The drama of ideas, often embedded, at least since Shakespeare's time, in what has been called 'the problem play' arose in Henrik Ibsen's work largely because Norway, a recently independent nation, was at the time forging anew its national identity. As an Irishman hoping for an Ireland newly independent of British rule, Shaw was well aware of problems of national as well as personal identity. The drama of ideas was a logical outcome for dramatists wishing to explore such themes in the theatre.
This unit thus studies Arms and the Man as a play of ideas illustrating some of the concerns of the society and the theatre of Shaw's time.
Unit 5: Shakespearean sonnets
This unit explores the sonnet as used by Shakespeare, showing how he makes this short form of poetry pack in a great deal of human experience. It also notes that sonnets were often written to form parts of a larger design in the sonnet 'sequence'. The unit also notes the difference from the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet's rhyme scheme.
The sonnet arrived in England under the influence of Italian sonneteers and created a fashion among poets such as Wyatt, Surrey, Spenser, and Sidney. Among the Elizabethan writers, Shakespeare developed his own approach to the sonnet, sometimes making fun of the conventions used by his predecessors and contemporaries. His rhyme scheme is looser than that of the Italian sonnet. He gives the impression of a man meditating, talking to himself, or to others, about significant moments and problems encountered in real life. This he achieves by his choice of subject matter and his colloquial diction. The sonnets may be connected in subject matter with some of the plays and it is noteworthy that in Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare marks the moment of their falling in love by writing their dialogue as if it were a sonnet.
Unit 6: Romantic poetry
This unit explores what is implied by the label 'romantic' through studying poems dating from the late eighteenth century into the early nineteenth century. We shall examine the themes, personal and societal, with poetic forms, verbal imagery and music in our discussion.
There are many thousands of definitions for the term 'romantic' and this shows that no single definition of romantic or romanticism as a literary movement in Europe is wholly satisfactory. The medieval use of the term 'romance' was a way of describing the modern languages of Europe derived partly from Latin but very different from it — Italian, French, and Spanish were different from Latin and newly important, finally eclipsing Latin. These were the romance languages. Thus the term suggests something new, something different from the classicism of Ancient Greece and Rome. In the neo-classical period of English literature stretching from the seventeenth into the eighteenth century, certain writers began to rebel against neo-classical methods and embraced new and different attitudes and conventions. Examples among the poets were Thomson, Young, Gray, Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge. In the nineteenth century, a younger generation of writers followed, such as Shelley, Keats, and Lord Byron. These new attitudes were also felt in Europe, the early Romantics and Byron being much admired there, and it was the German Schlegel who first used 'romantisch' about literary works. We shall work again through the study of individual poems.
Unit 7: Modern poetry
This unit explores some of the poetry written in the late nineteenth century and stretching into the twentieth century. Poetry written nowadays is usually called 'contemporary poetry' to distinguish it from the earlier modern poetry and some other movements such as 'war poetry' or 'new romanticism'.
What is generally known in English literature as the modern period begins in the late nineteenth century and stretches into the late twentieth century. Within this period critics and literary historians have used the term 'modernism' as a way of classifying some of the prominent modern writers who experimented in such a way as to ensure that their work was not Victorian. Social attitudes changed rapidly in the latter years of Queen Victoria's reign and after World War I it has been said that society was never the same. World War II brought further significant changes to the world and to Britain in particular. Writing could not help being affected by these upheavals. Subject matter, forms and conventions, and literary experiments, all challenged the reader. New methods of close reading of texts dominated criticism. Difficulty and obscurity of texts was often seen as a sign of intellectual power and literary merit. In some cases this might be true; in others we must admit that merely private references and symbolism do little for literature as communication between people.
Unit 8: Post-colonial poetry
This unit explores some of the poetry written in English in British colonies or former colonies, hence the term 'post-colonial'. Such poetry is distinguished by the fact that though it uses English as its language, it expresses the sensibilities and concerns of writers who live and work in, or originate from, different countries around the world.
Advanced thinkers in Britain and elsewhere reject the old idea held by rulers from ancient times onwards that by conquest one could become a 'great' king and warrior and extend one's land until it was a mighty empire. It is but recently in the history of human beings that people have argued that empires are wrong, because they subject people of different regions, cultures, and languages to some central rule not necessarily theirs. Nevertheless, it is also true that the organization of large groups of people under a central government is necessary to avoid chaos and to enable peaceful trading and more comfortable ways of life. With the break-up of the British empire, beginning with American independence in the late eighteenth century, followed later by Irish independence in southern Ireland just after World War I, and continuing at a faster pace after World War II in different regions around the world, we have seen the growth of new literatures all using English as their language. Thus we have a growth of distinct new literary histories in the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and more recently India and the Caribbean.
Novels, plays and poetry have all been written to become part of a new dimension in English literary history but in this unit we study just some of the poetry.
Assignment File
Your Assignment File contains information such as the number of assignments: two essays (assignments) and one oral presentation by means of the OLE. You will also note there is a two-hour examination at the end for the whole course. See more details in the section on assessment in this Course Guide and in the Assignment File itself.
Presentation schedule
The Presentation Schedule is available on the Online Learning Environment (OLE). It gives the dates for completing assignments, and attending tutorials, together with other practical information.
Other print materials
For the ENGL A132 units listed above, the required texts are all the plays and poems studied in the course and some reference books (see below).
You are expected to read all the set plays and poems and selected useful pages from the reference texts. It will be useful, too, if you read materials online in relevant official websites listed for the course.
Set plays:
Shakespeare, William (1979) A Midsummer Night's Dream, London: Arden, http://shakespeare.mit.edu/midsummer/full.html
Shaw, George Bernard (1990) Arms and the Man, New York: Dover, https://onemorelibrary.com/index.php/en/books/literature/book/english-literature-172/arms-and-the-man-2204
Sophocles (1994) Oedipus the King, New York: Pocket Books or New York: W W Norton & Company.
Set poems:
W H Auden's Stop all the Clocks, Cut off the Telephone
Seamus Heaney's Digging, Mid-Term Break
Ezra Pound's The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter, In a Station of the Metro
Robert Burns' A Red, Red Rose (1796)
T S Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Shakespearean Sonnets # 17, 18, 29, 73, 91, 116, 129 and 130
Derek Walcott's A Far Cry from Africa, A City's Death by Fire, Two Poems on the Passing of an Empire and A Letter from Brooklyn
William Blake's Tyger, The Chimney Sweeper (1789 and 1794) and The Sick Rose
Wordsworth's She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways (1800) and London (1802)(1800)
W B Yeats' The Second Coming
Reference books:
- Abrams, M H (2011) A Glossary of Literary Terms, 10th edn, Boston: Thompson.
- Booth, A, Paul, J J and Hunter, B (2005) The Norton Introduction to Literature, shorter 9th edn, New York: W W Norton & Company.
Set textbook
There is no set textbook for this course.
Online and multimedia materials
Video
A series of video presentations will be provided. These will be uploaded to HKMU's Online Learning Environment (OLE).
Websites
The following websites will be highlighted for student use (interactive use) as they embrace thematic topics within units:
Introduction to Drama:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_genre
Greek Drama:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_of_ancient_Greece
http://www.usu.edu/markdamen/ClasDram/chapters/061gkthea.htm
Shakespeare:
http://www.william-shakespeare.info/site-map.htm
And the Globe:
http://www.william-shakespeare.info/william-shakespeare-globe-theatre-structure.htm
G B Shaw:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Bernard_Shaw
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_and_the_Man
Romanticism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romantic_poetry
Modern Poetry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernist_poetry_in_English
Post-Colonial:
http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/ellpatke/poco/index.htm
Walcott:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Walcott
Equipment needed (IT resources)
Hardware
- a PC with a Pentium III 800 MHz processor or better;
- 512 MB RAM (ideally 1GB RAM);
- 1GB of free disk space;
- earphones and a microphone; and
- a broadband connection to the Internet
Software
- English Windows XP or better;
- Web browser: Firefox 2, Internet Explorer 7, or a compatible equivalent.
These will enable you to write and also consult information available through the Internet. Please note that you may also be required to download some free software to your computer for recording your oral presentation to be submitted online for Assignment 3.
Assessment
Continuous assessment
Continuous assessment for ENGL A132 is built upon two approaches. The first is the traditional essay mode, which will be used in the first two assignments of the course. The second approach is the motivational mode of oral presentation assessment.
Assignments
There are two assignments in the form of essays. Assignment 1 covers Units 1 to 3 and Assignment 2 relates to Units 4 to 6. These two assignments emphasize your critical, analytical and written abilities and are designed to help you in exploring the selected literary texts and relevant concepts further. The assignments are worth 35% of the total course marks.
Oral presentation
The second approach to continuous assessment requires students to make an oral presentation by audio recording, to be submitted through the OLE. This comprises 15% of the total course marks.
Final examination
The final examination will be course-wide in scope and will cover all dimensions of ENGL A132. Through a two-hour examination session, students will have the opportunity to display their understanding and analytical ability in the learned areas. Both short questions and essay questions will be included.
The assessment items are outlined in the following table.
Assessment | Course area covered | Weighting |
Assignment 1 | Units 1-3 | 15% |
Assignment 2 | Units 4-6 | 20% |
Assignment 3 (Oral presentation through audio recording) | Entire course | 15% |
Exam | Entire course | 50% |
Total | 100% |