English

This course presents an advanced study of oral and written English expression. It examines idea organization as well as proper usage of language: introductions; conclusions; sentence structure; and vocabulary. The course presents specific techniques of written and oral expression: paragraphs; coherence and cohesion; creative writing; text revision; pronunciation and intonation; dialogue; oral presentations; discourse organization; gesticulation; improvisation; and interviews. 

The course introduces students to the social, political, and cultural contexts out of which its set texts emerge and explores the diverse ways poets, novelists, playwrights and essayists have engaged with their historical moments and written the city. The course is arranged in reverse chronological order, to give a sense of digging down into the strata of London’s accumulated meanings. The course also helps lay the foundation for students' own writing life in London over the course of their study at King’s. 

Stylistics aims to render literary judgments about literary texts comprehensible by focusing attention on the linguistic choices embodied in literary texts. The course introduces some of the most exciting stylistic analyses and applies it to a variety of literary and filmic texts.

This course introduces key works of modernist literature, mostly written in English, though several are by émigré writers. It examines the ways in which modernists developed new forms, whether narrative, poetic, or dramatic, through which to reimagine the representation of consciousness, character, personality, subjectivity, memory, and time. The first half of the course focuses specifically on modernist experiments with narrative voice, exploring the ways that modernist writers such as Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, and James Joyce playfully complicated the relationship between reader and narrator. In the second half of the course students think in more depth about experiments by writers such as T.S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf with time, memory, and un/consciousness. 

Students research a self-chosen topic and develop an extended research essay under the direct tutelage of an appointed mentor. Students engage in conversation with teachers who are experts in the subject being studied. These tutorials allow students to develop their own ideas under the direct supervision of a tutor.

This seminar explores the relations between Transcendentalism and various reform movements and utopian projects of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, in the areas of religion, education, women's rights, socialism, pacifism, and abolitionism. It places special emphasis on three themes: the religious and philosophical roots of the idea of human perfectibility; the self-image of the age (the nineteenth-century as the Age of Progress), and its critics; and the tension between individual and collective ideals of reform.

This course focuses on British poetry written in traditional forms from 1770 - 1850, as well as some modern and contemporary poetry. It introduces the major writers of the Romantic period: William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Gordon (Lord Byron), Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and John Keats.  Works from other Romantic period authors including Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincey, and Jane Austen will also be covered. 

Students will be expected to read poetry from the British Romantic period and show their understanding of the text and contexts by writing their own translations/imitations. The course covers traditional English poetic forms such as quatrains, the sonnet, the Spenserian stanza, ottava rima, the English ode, and others. 

Officially, there are no prerequisites for this course; however, History of English Literature I (LIT106) (Anglo-Saxon - 1800) and History of English Literature II (LIT107) (1800 - Contemporary) are *strongly* recommended. GEH024 World of English Literature ('Lyric to Lyrics') is also recommended for a basic understanding of English poetic form. (For visiting students, the course requires some background knowledge of English poetry and the Romantic period, for example a 100-level survey literature course.) In the past, students who have not taken LIT106 and LIT107 first sometimes struggled with LIT226.