| Unit name | Elegy |
|---|---|
| Unit code | ENGL29010 |
| Credit points | 20 |
| Level of study | I/5 |
| Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 1 (weeks 1 - 12) |
| Unit director | Dr. Baden-Daintree |
| Open unit status | Not open |
| Pre-requisites |
None. |
| Co-requisites |
None. |
| School/department | Department of English |
| Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
This unit considers poetry of grief and mourning from the Middle Ages to the present day, and will provide an overview of the some of the most influential elegies and elegists. However, there will also be a strong focus on contemporary poetry, and we will explore the ways in which more recent English and American poets react against the conventions of the English elegiac tradition, and the reasons why elegy engages so persistently with such formal concerns. Much critical work on elegy is based on psychoanalytical approaches to bereavement and mourning, so, in addition to literary criticism, reading might include authors such as Freud, Klein, Abraham and Torok, together with psychoanalytical studies of grief and loss (Bowlby, Kübler-Ross). Some seminars will place earlier elegies alongside modern counterparts; others will take a more thematic approach, considering, for example, AIDS memoir and elegy, or the pastoral elegy. There will also be the opportunity to consider the interactions of the elegiac genre with other poetic and literary forms, and with other aspects of visual and material culture.
Students should have read widely in elegiac writing in English, and also in criticism of Elegy. They should have acquired a theoretically and historically aware and critically independent knowledge and understanding of Elegy as a literary genre, and thus have developed a deepened appreciation of its intrinsic and extrinsic creative interest and importance throughout the writing of poetry in English.
Weekly seminars.
Two summative essays: one 2,000 word essay (33.3%); and one 4,000-word essay (66.7%).
Freud, Mourning and Melancholia (1917)
Peter Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (1985)
Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (1994)
Karen Weisman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy (2010)
Poems include: Pearl (and Jane Draycott’s Pearl), poems by Spenser, Jonson, King; Milton, Lycidas; Shelley, Adonais; Tennyson, In Memoriam; Hardy, Poems 1912-13; and a wide selection of late 20th century and 21st
century elegies.
