Course Syllabus: The Architecture of the Record

"The Soul selects her own Society — Then — shuts the Door —"

I. COURSE OBJECTIVES

Welcome to English 3. This course is designed to explore the structural integrity of the human experience—from the expansive observations of the 19th century to the eventual dissolution of the 20th-century self. We will focus on the mechanics of identity, the grammar of isolation, and the forensic maintenance of the written record. Students will learn to navigate the labyrinth of the text until the boundary between the reader and the record is removed.

II. REQUIRED READINGS

• Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass; "When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer"
• F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
• William Golding: Lord of the Flies
• J.D. Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye
• The Bible (Selected Literary Contexts)

• Edgar Allan Poe: "The Masque of the Red Death"
• Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
• William Blake: "The Sick Rose"; "A Poison Tree"; "The Tyger"
• Flannery O’Connor: "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"

• Edward Albee: The Zoo Story
• Anton Chekhov: "The Bet"
• Joyce Carol Oates: "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"
• William Shakespeare: Macbeth
• John Keats: "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
• T.S. Eliot: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

• Emily Dickinson: "I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died"; "Exultation is the going"; "Apparently with no surprise"; "Because I could not stop for Death"; "The Soul selects her own Society"; "If you were coming in the fall"; "A narrow fellow in the grass"
• Percy Bysshe Shelley: "Ozymandias"
• W.B. Yeats: "Sailing to Byzantium"

III. GRAMMAR & MECHANICS

Units will cover the Sentence Base, Subject-Verb Agreement, and the poetic use of Scansion. Special attention will be paid to the use of the Dash and the Ellipsis as tools for indicating the presence of what has been removed or left behind.