FALL 2006 HONORS COURSES

HONR 299N Through a Glass Darkly: the Child and Literature
Tuesday/Thursday, 2:00-3:15 p.m.
Dr. Don Kleine, Department of English

What is a person? How do people fit into society? How do we encounter time and death? Using the way children have been presented in literature as our examining lens, we will in this course try to discover some of the answers to these questions in terms of Western culture over the last two hundred years. We will study changing images of human juveniles in poems and fiction and through these images build a richer understanding of what it means, or has meant, to be human. Whether they view the child as a victim of a society which oppresses adults too, or else take note of her/his poetic vivacity and inward intensity, writers in the last two centuries have found in childhood not only a memory of where we were but a heightened awareness of who we are.

Students’ personal recollections–of toys and what they meant, of playground cruelties, or first impressions of death or sex–are an important part of the seminar. Apart from class discussions, each student will give a 15 minute reading report on an outside book (perhaps a novel, or else a study in child psychology or cultural history), and also participate with several others in a 20 minute discussion panel pertinent to that day’s assignment. (For example, David Copperfield: Do children think they’re children?) You’re encouraged to keep a reading notebook, which could give you ideas for the two out-of-class papers (each, 7-8 pages). There will be a final exam covering the semester’s required readings.

Tentative Reading List:
Selected poems of Blake and Wordsworth
Dickens, Oliver Twist and David Copperfield (first 100 pages)
Carroll, Alice in Wonderland; James, What Maisie Knew
Roth, Call it Sleep; Golding, Lord of the Flies; Kincaid, Annie John
Also, Xeroxed stories by D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, J.D. Salinger, Faulkner, and Hemingway; Xeroxed poems by Dylan Thomas, E.E. Cummings, W.B. Yeats, and others

CORE–Literature [HL]