This course provides beginning students of English with a chronological outline of early literature in English from the Middle Ages to the late eighteenth century. It introduces them to the central themes, genres, and forces that have shaped the early history of literature as well as the tools, vocabularies, and critical practices of literary studies. We will organize our semester around four themes: inventing a nation; the sacred and the secular; centers and margins; private and public. We will study, among others, four of the following key texts and authors: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and one of Defoe's novels.

Alice Munro titles one of her short stories "What is Remembered," implying that what we retrospectively make of experience may be quite different from how we lived it at the time. Memoir is rooted in autobiographical facts but facts selected, arranged, and sometimes exaggerated or supplemented, whether to bring out the inner truth of an experience, to help in the creation of a private identity or public image, or simply to tell a better story. Writing about our life is not only, as Benjamin Franklin said, the next best thing to reliving it; it may also be an improvement on it, both in the story it tells and in the satisfaction it gives in bringing chaos to order. The course will explore the activity of going back in memory both in autobiographical writing and in fiction.