HUAS82300 - Literature Summer Intensive Course....
Course Description
In this one week intensive course, students will engage in close reading and discussion of two classic works taken from the AP English Literature list. The class will meet daily from 10 am to 3 pm, with an hour break for lunch at noon. The first two-hour section will focus on Shakespeare’s As You Like It, and the second on the novel Jane Eyre. Teachers can earn PD/CPDU credits. Classes will be held at 1427 E. 60th St, Hyde Park campus.
Shakespeare’s As You Like It - Nicholas Bellinson
"Blow, blow, thou winter wind Thou art not so unkind As man's ingratitude." Among Shakespeare's comedies, As You Like It offers the fullest example of his "green world" (to use Northrop Frye's expression) - an essential comic realm of nature where firm identity and self-control give way to a more expansive, imaginative, and yes, natural self. Yet the Forest of Arden is filled with deep sadness and contradiction as well as exquisite songs and laughing lovers. We will endeavor to understand Jacques's melancholy, Rosalind's transformation into Ganymede and - perhaps - back again, and the miraculous conversion of the usurping Duke, among other puzzles, in our five intensive morning sessions. Other themes likely to emerge are the pastoral, love and its transformative power, song, poetry, and the most famous articulation of life as theater in all of literature, Jacques's speech on the seven ages of man ("All the world's a stage..."). Students should read the entire play for the first session.
Jane Eyre - Cynthia Rutz
In the 19th century, the Brontë sisters wrote novels that have become touchstones for the power and passion of romantic love. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre tells the story of a poor and plain but intrepid orphan who matures into a thoughtful, passionate woman, capable of great love but equally capable of standing on her own. Her romance with the dark, brooding Mr. Rochester is only part of the story. The rest is about how she comes into her own power, shaping her own life and that of others by the moral choices that she makes. For the first class, please read the first five chapters of Jane Eyre. (1 week)