Completed: my Brit Lit I survey course for Fall2022

Finally completed -- every single lesson plan for the Brit Lit I (Beowulf to Milton) course I'm teaching this fall. ... although technically, it's called "British and American Literature: From Beowulf to 1660." Anyway, there's 31,000 words of text in the document, plus one detailed PowerPoint to help explain the Gael/Briton/ Celtic/Anglo-Saxon thing (something that's always perplexed me about early British history), and of course all my quizzes set-up in D2L.

Normally, working this far ahead seems crazy to me, but the subject matter is still unfamiliar enough that I decided to forego the standard week-by-week route .... and, honestly, I needed to see the shape of my entire course before even finalizing a reading list. I never imagined that I would need three weeks for Chaucer, for instance ....

I'm truly amazed, though, at some of the possibilities created by this course's parameters. For instance, the combination of British and American literature in a survey course is not something I've seen before, but it allows me to pair Bartolome de las Casas with Spenser's A View on the State of Ireland, which forms an interesting conjunction between colonialism in Ireland and in the Americas. Likewise, I can pair John Milton with The Day of Doom by Michael Wigglesworth, the American Puritan.

What's even more astounding, at least for me, is just how much I remember from my survey course in British Literature, which I took during my freshman year at Lycoming College back in Fall 1997. I didn't even like that course -- the professor was a snappy dresser, but widely disliked -- and I only got something like a B-. Still, besides introducing me to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which remains my all-time favorite piece of medieval literature, it's mesmerizing how many ideas and themes for this course arose like ghosts from that old one. As I was researching "Beowulf to 1660," I've thought more about that old class's texts and themes than I ever have before. Memory's a weird thing.

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EDIT P.S. As an addendum to the last two paragraphs, one of the texts I'm using, which was also used by my 1997 Brit Lit course, is Marlowe's The Tragedy of Doctor Faustus. Early in the play, when Faustus summons Mephistopheles, he of course first appears as a devil. When Faustus objects, Mephistopheles rematerializes as a friar, which of course Faustus thinks is hilarious. Well, because in my class we've just read the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales two weeks earlier, students will know a little something about monks and friars .... and thus Marlowe's joke is going to make more sense. It's these nice little connections, too, that have really made researching this course worthwhile.

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