<p>I think the Renaissance course sounds fascinating, and it introduces students to many of the best writers of the time, famous and not-so-, as well as some of the most important themes; in a period when women were only beginning to be “allowed” to write, even in private, when all actors were male and female parts were played by men (a source of many jokes in the texts), when many plays featured actors playing women playing men, when some playwrights (including Shakespeare) were bisexual, the intersections between gender and expectations and realities are especially fruitful, and offer students a starting point from which to explore a period which can be overwhelming. </p>
<p>As BrooklynbornDad points out, Romanticism is a movement that features a pretty standard canon of mostly male writers; unlike the -isms conservatives decry, romanticism was a contemporaneously embraced, self-consciously adopted aesthetic of writers who thought they were radical thinkers, and were at the time, but who have since been mainstreamed (besides Blake and Wordsworth, you’d have Carlisle, Coleridge, Byron, both Shelleys, Keats, Poe and Hawthorne). There isn’t much in that course you wouldn’t have found half a century ago. </p>
<p>And for the last course–literature cannot be limited only to the texts that express one viewpoint, or civilization could have stopped writing a long time ago. Good literature is imaginative, expressive, complicated, simple, and satisfying; not all literature does that for all people, nor can it. Sometimes texts that are really difficult to read, like King Lear, are challenging in important ways. Part of learning to read literature is to try to leave behind your culture and your expectations and tackle a text on its own terms; it is important to do that for Beowulf, and it’s important–perhaps more important–to do that for literature that expresses a minority view of your own time. </p>
<p>“Close reading” is a part of all good English study; papers must use the texts as evidence in the argument. The course descriptions might talk about exploring and thinking and grappling, but the papers will rely on close reading, or they will be unacceptable, in my experience. I have read and listened to many a paper that examined only a few lines of text! There is a difference, however, between close reading and the branch of criticism popular after WWII, called New Criticism, which called for reading a text in a vacuum, without the benefit of context either historical or literary; that kind of criticism proved to be pretty sterile. But context doesn’t replace the text, it enriches our understanding of it. Now, literary theory can sometimes drop the textual ball and go off into the realms of philosophy, but most undergraduates will not be wrestling with the likes of Derrida.</p>
<p>Most college English teachers will tell you that they spend a good deal of their time trying to get students to abandon their death-grip on the five-paragraph structure that was drilled into them all through high school, and spend more time on the thinking and evidence that goes into a good paper: most kids have been taught that the really important thing is to write an introduction (with intro sentence, elaboration, and conclusion–all in the same paragraph!), three paragraphs outlining the argument, with evidence (each paragraph must have an introductory and concluding sentence), and a final paragraph concluding the paper (with, of course, an introductory and concluding sentence). It is really hard to write a good paper with that kind of plodding construction–the framework gets in the way.</p>