| CODE | ENG1275 | ||||||||
| TITLE | Genre 2: The Lyric | ||||||||
| UM LEVEL | 01 - Year 1 in Modular Undergraduate Course | ||||||||
| MQF LEVEL | 5 | ||||||||
| ECTS CREDITS | 2 | ||||||||
| DEPARTMENT | English | ||||||||
| DESCRIPTION | The study-unit aims to review the tradition of the lyric as it plays itself out in English poetic tradition, and reviews the correspondences between the lyric and the study of genre. The study-unit also seeks to demonstrate the ways that the lyric ‘I’ speaks as a creation of poetic language. The term ‘lyric’ has evolved and been redefined and even contested over the centuries. This study-unit will trace the history of the term from its classical origins through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the late Victorian period, and the twentieth century. We shall use as a focal point three aspects of the lyric: the lyric ‘self’; love and desire in the lyric; and the relationship between lyric, poetry, and performance. Problems of definition of the genre will be discussed. The study-unit starts by investigating how subjectivity is encoded in the texts of a wide variety of medieval narratives and lyrics: i.e. how subjectivity, escaping the bounds of individuality, is incorporated in the linguistic fabric of the texts concerned. We will discuss how lyric poetry has long been regarded as the intensely private, emotional expression of individuals, powerful precisely because it draws readers into personal worlds. We will focus on the intriguing premise that the ‘I’ in a lyric is only a virtual entity and that lyric poetry takes its power from the public, emotional power of language itself. Thus, lyric forms convey both personal and communal emotional histories in language. The primary texts chosen for study in any one year may change. From the early period of the lyric they may include: medieval lyrics, troubadour lyrics, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, The Man of Law's Tale, and Complaint Unto Pity, the works of the Pearl poet, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Havelok the Dane, the lyric sequence attributed to Charles of Orleans (the earliest such sequence in English), and anonymous lyrics. Reference will also be made to the folksong, popular literature after 1450 (including the outlaw ballads), and tales of enchantment. The study-unit may go on to examine the ways in which the tropes and rhetoric of love poetry were used to court Elizabethan women (not only at court and in the great houses, but in society at large) and how the women responded to being wooed, in poetry and speech. Bringing together canonical male poets and recently discovered women writers, we may investigate a range of texts addressed to, written by, read, heard or transformed by Elizabethan women, thus charting the beginnings of a female lyric tradition. Daniel’s lyric dialogue of courtship and Spenser’s ‘Amoretti’ may feature here. Examples from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries may be taken from the work of Hopkins, Arnold, Swinburne, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Wallace Stevens, Larkin, Plath, Anne Sexton, and Donald Davie. Reading List: Bahti, Timothy, Ends of the Lyric (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) Bell, Ilona, Women and the Poetry of Courtship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1999) Biester, J., Lyric Wonder: Rhetoric and Wit in Renaissance English Poetry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press: 1997) Campbell, Matthew, and Gillian Beer, Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2004) Wilhelm, James J., Lyrics of the Middle Ages: An Anthology (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1990) |
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| STUDY-UNIT TYPE | Lecture | ||||||||
| METHOD OF ASSESSMENT |
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| LECTURER/S | Norbert Bugeja |
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The University makes every effort to ensure that the published Courses Plans, Programmes of Study and Study-Unit information are complete and up-to-date at the time of publication. The University reserves the right to make changes in case errors are detected after publication.
The availability of optional units may be subject to timetabling constraints. Units not attracting a sufficient number of registrations may be withdrawn without notice. It should be noted that all the information in the description above applies to study-units available during the academic year 2025/6. It may be subject to change in subsequent years. |
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