English 308 - SEM: ONE BIG BOOK

This capstone course offers an intensive research-based study of a single important work of literature in English, seen in its social, historical, and intellectual context on the one hand, and in terms of its reception history on the other. Course may be repeated once for credit with different topic and instructor. Permission of the instructor required. Enrollment limited to 12. There are many ways in which a book may be ?big.? In this course, we explore the vastness contained in the relatively few pages of T.S. Eliot?s 1922 poem, The Waste Land. We frame our discussion of that poem with some attention to other work by Eliot, especially the earlier Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and the later Burnt Norton, but the bulk of our time is spent on a careful and layered reading of The Waste Land. This includes some reading of (usually parts of) many of the texts to which Eliot alludes or from which he quotes, and involves reading criticism of the poem to see how it becomes a new work for each new generation of readers. Main written work will be an article-length critical research paper.

Topic: The Waste Land. Instructor Permission. Not open to first-years, sophomores