- Enseignant-e: Simon Swift
Welcome to the English Department, and welcome to BA1! BA1 introduces students to the reading of English literature and the writing about it. It is divided into four parts over two semesters: the first on poetry and the essay taught by Simon Swift in the autumn; the second on drama and narrative taught by Martin Leer in the spring. Each weekly lecture is supported by a class (“Analysis of Texts” or AT) where questions, ideas and readings presented in the lecture can be discussed by students with their teacher, and in which students can begin to develop their own readings of the primary texts. Every week, you will also have a class in composition (“Critical Writing”), where you will learn the mechanics of good writing at BA level.
In the autumn semester we will start to think about what is at stake in the study of a poem in English through close reading of a range of poetic examples. We will then consider the essay as a literary form that has a history. We will ask what essays are trying to do as forms of writing, what reading them can teach us about how to write them, and how essays can help us to close read poems.
In the spring semester some of the essential features of drama (genre, plot, character, dramatic language and media) will be introduced through a close reading of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Some of the basic features of narrative, such as story, plot, characterisation, and narrative voice, will then be introduced through close analyses of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Nuruddin Farah’s Maps.