ELA 12: British Literature—Semester A - Course Introduction
Shmoop's ELA 12 course has been granted a-g certification, which means it has met the rigorous iNACOL Standards for Quality Online Courses and will now be honored as part of the requirements for admission into the University of California system.
This course has also been certified by Quality Matters, a trusted quality assurance organization that provides course review services to certify the quality of online and blended courses.
If you're reading this paragraph while drinking tea out of your collectible Will-and-Kate wedding china, then you're ready to go. Feel free to pick up your nearest Dickens novel and dive right in.
But maybe you're not sure. Maybe you looked at the first line of the first text on this syllabus ("Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote") and glazed over right before hitting Minecraft for the third straight hour.
Let us convince you.
If you're reading this in English—which, since we're writing in English, we assume you are—then part of your cultural and literary heritage is British. Your family may be from Russia or Korea or Ethiopia, but the words you use and the speech patterns you adopt are deeply, profoundly British. Even your way of thinking is influenced by the ways of thinking that developed in British literature, all the way back in the 14th century.
Look, we get it. You hear "British literature" and you think tea cozies, long words, and cucumber sandwiches. We're not going to lie: the works you're going to read in this class do indeed contain tea cozies, long words, and cucumber sandwiches. But that's not all. They also contain illicit sex, high-stakes love affairs, and lots and lots of fart jokes. Yes: fart jokes.
We're going to start way back in the days of monsters and vampires; Beowulf and Frankenstein and Dracula. But don't worry—if you're not into murder and swords, you'll soon find a raunchy poet who used the low-class language of English to write a bunch of naughty stories about religious hypocrites. (You've probably heard of him; his name is Geoffrey Chaucer .) And then we're off on a whirlwind tour of seven centuries of English (and Irish and Scottish) literature. We'll cover the hyper-religious (the King James Bible) and the bawdy and profane (a satirical essay about killing babies). We'll cover the ultra-romantic (Milton—seriously) and the calm and pragmatic (Pride and Prejudice). We'll go serious and comic, and do poetry, drama, and—of course—the novel. We'll visit the mega-modern (Zadie Smith) and the mega-famous (J. K. Rowling).
Keep calm and read on, Shmoopers.
Objectives
By the end of this course, you should be able to
- identify major texts, themes, and authors of the Western Canon through the study of British literature.
- interpret music, art, films, and other visual mediums.
- analyze satire and informational text for revelations about societal values and traditions.
- apply literary theory to various texts.
- research important authors, movements, and historical eras to shed light upon perspectives in unit texts.
- use critical lenses and perspectives, from a feminist lens to a socioeconomic lens, to analyze and question major works and their themes.
- identify references and responses to—and critiques of—canonical works in contemporary art.
- create structured responses to college level literary analysis-based questions.
- create a literary analysis paper in response to informational and fiction texts.
- create a self-directed, academically rigorous expository paper.