What a first year english major has to read + lecture notes

hey welcome back to my channel if you are new here hi nice to meet you my name is emma since we have now crossed the barrier into september i thought it would be a good time to make another one of my kind of university videos or videos where i talk about university specifically what it's like being an english major what you have to study how you study what you have to read my channel is principally a booktube channel so i basically already talk about books all of the time but i always get so many questions specifically about english majors what it's like being in english literature and everything like that so i thought today i would make a whole video about one certain thing that i'm very excited to talk about and that is what a first-year english literature student or what a first year english major has to read now of course there are a few small details i want to kind of explain and say with this number one is that every single syllabus and every single first year english literature students experience is going to be completely and wholly unique and different from one another's there is no set way there is no set list of works and books and poetry and novels that any professor ever has to put down to complete their first year works everyone's syllabus and number of courses that they take is going to look extremely different because every english program is drastically different same can be said for professors each professor the way that they teach the way that they lecture the way that they mark is completely different and that makes kind of getting a list of books a very quirky and interactive and very interesting experience the second thing i should say is that i also wanted to include some lecture notes in here and like real actual lecture notes that i took from my first year at university which um when i pick up my little first-year english literature folder and notebook i just get so nostalgic and so reminiscent um so this contains all the notes i took from my first year english class that i'm going to be talking about in this video because i just think when i was going into my first year i would have loved for someone to have sat me down and for them to say okay this is what your first year can look like this is stuff you'll be discussing this is what a lecture can look like because i think going into university i really had no concept of what an actual english class at this academic level would look like so a lot of people have been asking me questions like that so i just thought i would go over my first year with you guys and of course for lecture notes as well there's no set way the professor needs to teach so each class taught by each professor is so different and interesting because they can choose anything at all they want to talk about concerning the works that we're going to be getting into i'll just give a brief little bit of background so you kind of know where i'm coming from get a little bit of that context in there i'm studying english literature and classical studies i'm currently trying to do like a double major where english is my main focus so that's where i'm at in my first year of english and in my first year of university i was actually in the sciences first but i was really really lucky because you actually are only pretty much required to take one credit english course in your first year to be able to proceed and go along to your second year and then take all the english of your dreams in second year so it was very much encouraged for me to kind of take all the subjects i wanted and to learn as much as i want to branch out and explore which is such a blessing and such a gift that i'm so appreciative because i explored five different subjects from five different faculties and it was a really great experience fortunately my favorite ended up being english so from there i decided to completely let go of science and pursue my english dreams and it was one of the best decisions i've ever made so that is where i'm coming from i think from there i'm just going to proceed i typed out the whole entire list of works that we studied in my first year english class this class was just an enriched introduction to english literature and in this class we went over 47 different works essays novels books poetry prose interviews documentaries we had it all this is really interesting too because a lot of times the course is focused on a specific thing like a survey and it goes chronologically whereas this english class that i took in my first year we just jumped around all over the place exploring different things learning how to analyze learning how to think learning how to read a book properly and insightfully and in depth and it was amazing so i think i'm just gonna go in order over the 47 different works that we studied in my first year it was a year-long english course i'm very excited to talk about these works that i haven't studied and go over all the lecture notes that i haven't read for a few years now so this is going to be really fun for me i'm going to try not to drag on and on about each work because i love discussing things for a long time but i'm going to try to keep it short sweet maybe i'll read you guys the first sentence of each work so you can kind of get your feet wet i don't know but i'm excited to go over the lecture notes give you a bit of background about the author what topics and what we discussed in class and essentially just show you what a first year english student gets to read all right that's it i'm very excited let's begin all right so almost all of the works i'm going to be mentioning with the exception of a few that i just have in books myself in poetry and stuff like that most of the works we studied came from the norton anthology of english literature aka the spinal cord annihilator and breaker of backs one thing i don't miss is lugging this around every day to school like are you kidding so the first work that i'm going to begin with and the first work that we studied in this class was the horse dealer's daughter by d.h lawrence written in 1916 i don't know what that was written in 1916 published in 1922. so d.h lawrence was writing the short story during world war one and it deals a lot with one of the main things we talked about in this first little work analysis which was modernism and modernity sometimes called the strange disease of modern life so the first sentence of the horse dealer's daughter is well mabel and what are you going to do with yourself ask joe with foolish flippancy so this whole short story is basically about our main character mabel and she is indeed the daughter of the horse dealer she and everyone around her i guess are quite affected by the symptoms and side effects of modernity which can include alienation isolation depression just upsetting spaghetti from this strange industrialism and strange modernization of everyday life that's going on there's this huge anxiety about kind of what your place in the world is going to look like and that's one of the main things that we talked about in this short story because mabel falls in love with this man named jack and then we talked about kind of what this love looks like my professor said something really cool what did he say he was like dh lawrence was not religious but he was religious about love because this is a love story again we looked at this love story from a lot of different angles so other things we discussed in terms of lecture notes in the horse dealer's daughter what did we talk about we talked about some fairy tale tropes and kind of who our main characters mabel and jack can be figured out what kind of princess actually mabel can be represented as and who jack finds himself to be we talked about symbolisms of different colors and different artifacts and different ways of talking another big thing we talked about in class was therapeutic culture where kind of in this time period the idea was to go out into nature refresh yourself take a break from modernity and industrialism and everything technology-wise that was going on kind of how people do like a social media cleanse these days i guess and then you would kind of come back into your everyday life and your social life and whatnot and you would be rejuvenated and restored so kind of this whole nature versus civilization and humankind and what we've built and what not that juxtaposition and contrast as well was kind of interesting to examine in danger lawrence's short story probably my favorite thing we talked about in the horse dealer's daughter was this rhetoric of magnification where dh lawrence basically takes a whole bunch of religious language and things from the bible and christian language and uses it to endow love with these salvationary and kind of christ-like qualities so yeah we talked about like the faith of human love and the appropriation of the language of christianity to amplify and resonate the story between kind of our two main lovers and i think the last thing i want to talk about is something we did quite often in this class as well which was such an important skill and so valuable as well was this like idea of reading against the grain so kind of not going along with every theory everything that's said about this story but reading it in the opposite way at times and if you read kind of this masculinized version of the horse dealer's daughter against the grain you kind of see how maybe jack is actually the one who's the main character and the one who's always in the um spotlight and it may actually turn into this coming of age story rather than this journey of mabel's so very yeah just twisty turning and like turning around looking at like text from like underneath shining a light into them looking at them in different ways kind of turning them upside down at times obviously just figuratively but um that was like one of the most important and the most interesting skills i definitely learned like just taking an english degree teaches you so much how to think and like different ways of thinking that your brain wasn't really going down the corridors of before so that was super cool the next work that we looked at in this class was the dead by james joyce i'd never read james joyce before going into this class and i ended up liking the short story the dad which appears in joyce's bigger collection called dubliners i liked it so much better than the horse dealer's daughter so a quick summary of the dead is that basically we're following this guy named gabriel he is irish he's going to these irish parties and this whole short story the dead is about criticizing the irish for being too dependent on their english counterparts and relations and neighbors and being too spiritually and just decadent in every single way and not being irish enough and this is james joyce calling them out calling them dead and saying hey you need to basically like relinquish this grasp that the english have on you so our main character gabriel goes to this party and it's basically just him seeing how bad the situation has indeed got and then his journey and his quest to really restore the irish restore himself take this redemptive arc i guess in his character and in his country one thing i enjoyed as well was that a lot of the time class would begin with a quote whether from the author himself or from a different philosophy or theory or just anywhere really sometimes even sometimes he would even use taylor swift quotes or he would quote mean girls um to kind of use this point or this one theory or this one idea in this one kind of coding or veil as a way to look at something it was very interesting how each class usually we only looked at something through like one or two lenses but there are like a trillion different slides and sets and microscope settings that you can really like tune and hone in to work on so that's really cool for this one he decided to quote uh james joyce himself talking about his own short story so he said it's a map of dublin on the inside of a garbage tin lin and he also said that it's a chapter in the moral history of my country the first sentence in the dead is lily the caretaker's daughter was literally run off her feet another thing that was really important we talked about with the dead was that almost every single character has some sort of disability like a speech impediment or they are physically disabled they have poor eyesight or they have some other sign of decay or death about them so the way that we kind of figured and talked about the dead in class the lecture notes for this work i guess was that the dead the short story was kind of like this program or this doctor's appointment in which joyce as the doctor would kind of sit you down point out your symptoms your illness and then give you like a pamphlet and a nice little program step by step how to cure yourself how to get back to normal and how to be your best healthy self we talked about paralysis both in terms of this kind of stagnant life of ireland and of its people that joyce is really trying to attack it's very kind of militant um call out we also got to talk about phrenology and how important it is to pay attention to the first time a character is introduced how they're introduced in what light they're introduced and what their introductions are so for example gabriel is the stout young man he has high color in his cheeks high brow which represents this kind of you know educational intelligence what not he has the exact same hairstyle as oscar wilde who is also an irishman who left for england and then one of the last things we talked about was the idea of the epiphany going on in this book and that gabriel has when he becomes enlightened is this enlightenment the shining of light on problems and what can be done about them so yeah overall i really enjoyed the dead i actually chose to write my second essay in this class on the use of gaslight and lighting in the dead which was super cool and i liked it and it was a good class the third work that we looked at in class was carnation by catherine mansfield and they just gave it to us on this little piece of paper so this was the work that we actually all had to write our first essay on this is a very again really short story about this girl named eve who's attending saul girl school it's about her thoughts in this very hot stagnant boiling classroom um and it's about relationships between women and education and everything like that and i really really liked it i think probably the only thing i really quickly want to say about this was was that like when you are given a text in front of you for an essay and it's an in-class essay and you're allowed to bring the text in oh my gosh quote from it because i just for some reason i like zoned out and my brain was like this is an in-class essay obviously they're not expecting me to have memorized quotes from the text and write them down even though you can do that but this was right in front of me for the whole essay and nowhere in my essay did i include direct quotes from the text so i got penalized a lot a lot because i just made a really stupid easy dumb error and i was like dang it but um it's definitely something i'm never gonna do again the next work that we went over was actually our first novel in this class and that was brave new world by aldis huxley i really really enjoyed my time with this book this is a very famous dystopian always compared and contrasted to 1984 which we did not study but brave new world actually focuses on our main character bernard marx yep set in a world where the world controllers have basically perfected um the world and people live in these very confined bubbles they take drugs in order to be happy and to be the perfect version of themselves they are supposed to be so when marx meets a whole bunch of other people who not a whole bunch a few others who are not feeling satisfied or as satisfied with their life and kind of criticize the uh flaws and ideology of the system that they live in there is a little bit of trouble that goes on he also discovers that there are places in the world where people live differently from him and outside the control of these world controllers and the dystopian kind of totalitarian system that they've created called the reservation so when he voyages there a whole bunch more things happen so in brave new world um sometimes as well we would use these kind of graphs or little pic pictograms or pictures or drawings or um what are they called pictograms pictograms so we talked about the difference kind of between utopia and dystopia and what constitutes both and then we talked about the kind of movement and flow of stories and their tragic movements and their comedic movements and what can kind of place both of these flows and things into dystopia or utopia we also got to discuss science fiction versus speculative fiction um and we got to discuss a few of the previous um inspirations and kind of influences that led brave new world to its creation this was lisa thomas moore's utopia which i actually had to read last year for a different class at uni so that was cool but also kind of about how utopia can either mean a good place or no place like nowhere depending on its usage we got to discuss world politics a little bit because this was written in 1931 the great depression is going on people are upset with their systems their economic values what has been set up there's a lot of totalitarian regimes going on in the world there's communism in russia there's fascism in italy so it's just a very very uh heavy political commentary going on in here too a couple other points we talked about very briefly we talked about consumerism and different little dialogues and things that they would have in here to promote different ideologies we talked about a kind of present tense existence within that we talked about cultural uniformity we got to talk about heteronormativity and we got to talk about different types of people and this kind of um typing and typology of characters that goes on in brave new world because if you've read it it's a little bit like the breakfast club actually um so that's brave new world the first sentence in chapter one is a squat gray building of only 34 stories all right moving on the next work we looked at was politics and the english language by george orwell the first sentence in this is pretty sassy most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the english language is in a bad way but it is generally assumed that we cannot buy conscious action do anything about it all right so if you've never been forced to read politics in the english language by george orwell it's actually a pretty interesting piece talking about how badly the english language is doing and how politics has completely destroyed vocabulary sentence structure and demolished the truth through language and how the way people talk today just doesn't cut it for georgia well there's a lot of points i agree with in politics and there's a lot of points i don't agree with in politics at all and it was really fun to discuss them in class so the main points that we talked about when it came to the english language and orwell's nice little essay was this idea of accountability in language transparency and language responsibility in language and a whole kind of host of different theories of language who uses it how is it used whose responsibility it kind of is to do the upkeep and the kind of trimming and grooming of language this essay definitely wasn't a place that we decided to stay in for very long but it was definitely really fun to discuss bouncing right along from orwell's kind of a little bit hidden satire to jonathan swift's very much not hidden satire we read a modest proposal whose first sentence is kind of like a cutout in a newspaper type of deal saying for preventing the children of poor people and ireland from being a burden to their parents or country and for making them beneficial to the public um his proposal for doing that making them beneficial is actually just to eat them this was quite fun because we got to look into satire quite deeply and different kinds of satire we got to discuss irony a whole bunch we also got to talk a little bit about northrop frye's idea i think it's in his anatomy of criticism about this kind of high memetic and low memetic codes and kind of what we look up to what we look down to what we strive to be what we just totally shove away from us and kind of ignore and don't want to be we talked about people's responses in books and otherwise in real life their responses to low characters people who are in the low medic code people we either look down with pity fear disgust or sympathy and then we got to talk about the theories of laughter why something is funny why laughter occurs what makes people laugh and those are incongruity relief superiority or social we also got to break down two different types of satire horation and juvenile all right moving on so in tutorial we got to talk about margaret atwood a lot we got to look at a lot of her poetry the first one we looked at was journey to the interior the first sentence is just so nice there are similarities i notice that the hills which the eyes make flat as a wall welded together open as i move to let me through become endless as prairies that the trees grow spindly have their roots often in swamps that this is a poor country that a cliff is not known as rough except by hand and is therefore inaccessible mark it out with we got to discuss kind of west the west kind of a western in backdrop addresses cowboy also by margaret atwood we also discussed this teeny tiny little poem by margaret atwood which is so devastating you fit into me like a hook into an eye a fish hook an open eye yeah crazy and i think the last margaret poem we talked about was after the agony so i love them all they were great another poem i'll mention very briefly because we literally spent like 20 minutes on it was dover beach then we took quite the step back in time to talk about romance and quests and journeys and medievalism because we talked about sir galman and the green knight the very famous epic poem that is one of the hardest poems to read out loud because it has a lot of tongue twisters in it the main thing we talked about in sargawan was obviously kind of the main structure and what are the main points and attributes that make up a romance and arthurian romance and that kind of thing we talked about what a quest actually is the aspect of a perilous journey a crucial struggle the exaltation of the hero we talked about chevalred code what religion was doing we talked about some characteristics of romances that can kind of be found to be at fault for example simplified characters in that they're either wholly good or holy evil we also talked about these exotic and foreign settings often making our hero voyage to a place that is unknown and uncomfortable and not their own locale and location something that is very different to them we talked about also how it kind of contrasts to the horse dealer's daughter and that the problems for example the problems in modernism and in d.h lawrence's are problems that are social problems and psychological problems whereas in things like romance and sergaon and the green knight these problems are moral and spiritual problems we got to talk about monarchy and the history of england a little bit where things are just intensely hierarchical and we talked about this kind of pure middle health flowing down from the ruler and cascading down the sides of a triangle obviously arthur is supposed to be at the top he's supposed to be setting the example supposed to be giving his kingdom what it deserves and what it needs to be fruitful but if you've read sir government in the green night you know things are not doing well the economy suffering and then one of the coolest things i think i enjoyed talking about instagram and in the green night was this idea of this balance and symmetry both in terms of content and these struggles and these things that would happen and then they would be matched in number for example there would be two struggles or there would be three um battles there would be four um announcements things like that and then it would also be mirrored in the content of the epic and of the poem which was really really cool like mirrored textually a very famous poem and a few other works from this very famous poet and author that i've actually had to look over a few more times in classes since this first class that i took in first year is john dunn so in this class we got to look at the flea we also got to talk about his very famous valediction forbidden mourning and then we got to discuss batter my heart also by dunn which is a very religious poem this class undone introduced me to one of the most exciting and like things i've become obsessed with in my english degree and what i always like to look at when i look at a work now which is teleology which is the study of first and final causes why something happens kind of all the calls and effects that lead it to happen which is so interesting the main things that we really focused on and spent the most time on in these lecture notes for class was this idea of humanism was this idea of metaphysical poetry and the metaphysical poets done being one of them we got to talk about petrarchan conceit and metaphysical conceit and then we got to talk pretty extensively about metaphors and what they're doing in specifically valediction forbidden mourning a kind of philosophy that we got to talk about because all the time in class as well you're not just looking at the text and the author in the background in the context you're looking at like politics and religion and history and just like literally every faculty ever is found in an english degree which is one of the main things that i love about this kind of degree structure and how it's taught and what it teaches you but we got to look at christian humanism and kind of how this dash um that connects it to is a connector of instability and anxiety because it's kind of this belief in religionary aspects and classical ideas of reason in the human we got to talk about how metaphysical conceit is working one idea through an entire poem or work in scientific terms which i really love as well moving on to robert browning next we got to talk about my last duchess um and the idea of the monologue and what robert browning is doing in that poem i love it this one i've had to study a lot of times even in high school actually i got to study that so fun so much fun another margaret atwood poem that we got to look at was this is a photograph of me that was what it was called we barely spent any time on it a lot of these works were always some that we took a lot of time to talk about and explain and others we didn't really spend very much time on at all a lot of it was self-study and independent analysis which i enjoyed actually to an extent um so that was one we didn't really look at in class was this is a photograph of me we also got to look at a couple leonard cohen poems namely to anne and then all there is to know about adolf eichmann this brings us nicely into i think our last essay of the semester which we all had to write on munitions by j.g seim i think i'm saying that right i just remember being such a tongue twister every time i try to say i think it's jg syme this is all about uh women working in the munitions factory during the war what their lives are like what they're doing and kind of obviously discussing so much gender and sexuality and the economy and warfare and military and whose responsibility it is to assign responsibility i really loved it munitions is a short story so yeah next up we got to look at a couple poems from robert frost which i was really excited about because um i actually was gifted this copy of robert frost's poetry i think she wrote an open it yeah from 2014 from my grandma merry christmas thank you grandma um so i actually got to take this with me to university look at a couple of poems specifically we looked at design which was really really good the first sentence is i found a dimpled spider fat and white on a white heel all holding up a moth like a white piece of rigid satin cloth it was really really great it's all about kind of discussing this argument from design and nature and wondering about the origin of creation and the creator and everything like that so that's something we got to talk a lot about too was um patterns in nature and religion and what frost really thought about both of those things and then the poem design also talks to a lot about life and death and there's a lot of items mentioned both natural items and artificial items and kind of what they really mean in terms of symbols of life and death yeah i really really loved it i'm so glad we got to study a little bit of robert frost we also got to discuss very briefly another poem called party piece by brian patton never heard of this the essay we all had to write on poetry was on this poem called the brilliant chimpanzees by patricia young i did not get along with this essay and with this poem at all i basically have just blocked it from my mind i think i really had no idea what i was writing the whole time i was writing that essay so um yeah i'm not going to talk about it a lot but i did read that boom this moves us right along into the famous william wordsworth we of course got to look at a few of his most famous poems in this first year introduction to literature so we got to study she dwelt among the untrodden ways we also got to look at a slumber did my spirit seal and of course we looked at composed upon westminster bridge as well as lines composed above tintern abbey so within this we started to talk a lot about romantic poets what they were doing this idea of liberty and individualism and freedom we started to talk about this shift in the construction and in the structure and rhyming schemes of poetry i was actually quite surprised because wordsworth ended up being i think my least favorite romantic poet and then my favorite that we started ended up being keats which i loved i loved so much we talked about his ode on a grecian urn and then uh we also talked about his other poem when i have fears within keats and especially in the ode on a green urn we got to talk about aestheticism and art for art's sake we also got to talk about platonism and neo-placinism and the platonic triad because of course a lot of uh what's discussed in keats's poem odon aggression earth is this kind of triangle of beauty truth and goodness he talks about the platonic ladder and the kind of world of forms and abstractness versus the real world and then one of my favorite things that we talked about with keats in general was negative capability and the idea of living in uncertainty and being capable of living like that capable of not knowing things of living um just with this unsureness all the time and of course keeps i don't know there's just so much magic in those classes with kate's because he died super young tuberculosis and there was so much that i just felt from so much of his poetry when we talked about them in class and those were probably some of my favorite pumps that we looked at in this class super briefly like almost not at all we touched on fern hill by dylan thomas which i think might be the last poem i talk about for a little bit because then we moved right into fugitive pieces which was our next big novel by anne michaels fugitive pieces is a novel set during the second world war and we're following um this protagonist and he's hiding and he's just witnessed his whole family been murdered basically in front of him and he runs away eventually he's picked up by this kind old man who takes him and hides him away in greece and it's about his life after the war he then moves to toronto and canada and starts this new life and it's kind of about these traces that you leave behind and the past and so much memory fugitive pieces i think was the first one of the first works that really really introduced me and got me so interested in the study of memory and literature although i don't think i really realized it at the time but even just the title is just all about memory and it was so fascinating we got to talk about epistemology and i also thought just throughout this whole year i got to learn so many new words because epistemology is ways and means of knowing things specifically we got to talk about the ethics and morality of memory and what role literature plays in having that ethical role and responsibility of preserving and teaching and keeping history but then also how that can be skewed and distorted and misused and used terribly and for horrible things i also just love how like remembering that's weird is literally just you're reconstructing memory it's this re-imagination this re-witnessing of a memory that is passed every time you remember something literally a note i have written down here is just yay books so i guess we were talking about how good books are for doing good things for history however we also talked about how like the earth itself and in nature and the physical earth that we live on is also playing a part in that and playing a part in memory and all of these traces that are left naturally and when things happen to the earth either natural disasters or things we've done for example signs and traces of war how the earth plays a part in that too which was so-called like stratification and just the study of geology and yeah ten out of ten a note i have down for this one too is just how much are we able to make our own history and destiny or are we driven to fate by choices that we cannot control which is a question that fugitive pieces really really begged a lot of the time so that was really interesting to grapple with as well and then we also talked about chaos theory how in the midst of randomness there is potential for order and then of course vice versa so for those of you wondering where shakespeare is in this whole mess of first year uh he is now here because we got to talk about sonnet 73 116 and 18 and then our bigger shakespeare work the play that we got to read in first year was the tempest the tempest is of course a comedy people speculate all the time that it's the last play that shakespeare wrote and that shakespeare kind of modeled himself in the tempest after one of the characters and it's like his big farewell to the stage very emotional i actually didn't enjoy it that much we talked about an elizabethan worldview and elizabethan politics and what was going on in england again at that time probably the most interesting thing i wrote down in terms of lecture notes in the tempest was that it deals with colonial relations and how those relationships crop up how they form what the power structures in them are like and what's really going on with them and then we talked about how shakespeare's idea of the marriage of true minds and then we talk we already talked about that a little bit with done but then also how it appears in the tempest by our two um lovers miranda and oh my gosh what's his face miranda's bf i don't know that's probably all i'm gonna say about shakespeare because then we moved into the work that we spent the most time on i believe in first year and these were actually my favorite classes all year were the ones that involved this work and this kind of led us into one of our huge main ideas and themes that we tried to follow and map throughout the whole course which was the idea of empire and imperialism um and it's so fascinating to look at it in this work and in this epic poem uh you probably know what i'm talking about but it's paradise lost by john milton this i think i can safely say this was my favorite work that we looked at all year i'm so glad that it crops up so often in other uni classes i've taken since then because this was just like the best time of my gosh darn life if you were wondering don't be worried we didn't have to read all of it we just were asked to read a few select books from milton's epic epic poem if you've never heard of paradise lost it's basically just bible fan fiction where milton re-writes basically the creation of the world the fall of adam and eve the fall of mankind satan and his whole host of friends i think for the first time in this course paradise lost was the place where we talked about everything whereas in works before we had just talked about some of these things and separate things for example politics history the text itself the author's intentions the author's history we talked about devices that were used obviously symbolism we use so many different philosophies and theories and it was just so interesting to look at it from so many different angles but the most just crazy thing and most interesting thing to me that we talked about was definitely this idea of imperialism and both the sides of heaven and hell creating their own empire as well as humankind actually uh i chose to write my final essay in this course on paradise lost it was just so interesting to like compare these two sides of empire and then also to like look at imperialism through milton's timeline and then to look up and look at it through our own it was just it was so crazy i absolutely loved it first go a paradise loss of man's first disobedience and the fruits of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste brought death into the world and all are woe with loss of eden to one greater man restore us and regain the blissful seat spectacular yeah we just spent weeks and weeks and weeks upon this and i loved it so much at the same time that we were talking about this in class we also studied a few more works in tutorial very very short ones for example we studied a castaway which is a short story by augusta webster i believe we studied the orchard pit by dante gabriel rosetti and then we studied the defense of gwenevere i do want to admit i sometimes when you're an english degree you don't get the chance to read everything because there's just so many things to read however the only thing i did not read in this whole class was the defense of gwenevere so i can tell you absolutely nothing about it maybe someday i'll read it but that was the one that i was just like okay we're gonna have to cut this one out don't have time to read it so i did not read uh the defense of buena bear but right after paradise lost we moved into another epic poem which was like probably my oh was it my second favorite work that we studied i don't know it was the rape of the lock by alexander pope which is so interesting especially again to compare it to paradise lost and imperialism um that's what i wrote my final essay on was paradise lost and the rape of flaw comparing those two and what women and kind of their place and what eco-feminism and everything like that was doing in both of these works so interesting just so interesting i'm like just having the best time ever remembering my experience and first year in this class is making me just so happy basically just to give you a brief summary of the rape of the lock we're following our protagonist belinda and at i think it's a party yes party or ball um this awful man named peter comes and takes off a lock of her hair with scissors so it is all about her reaction to this loss of a lock of her hair but it's so much more than that it is so interesting so beautifully written and i just loved it in terms of the rape of vlogs some lecture notes we talked about again were these glimmers of imperialist ethos we talked about different forms of love that went on in the rape of the lock we talked about these neoclassical ideas of beauty and balance and architecture even at times which was really really cool also something we got to talk about was like um some anthropological theories of humans and their dispersion and how they moved throughout the earth which was really really cool and where they settled um and different theories of migration and everything like that this brings me into the next poem we studied which was goblin market by christina rosetti i love this this is a really really beautiful poem about two sisters um and unfortunately one of the sisters falls under the sway and spell of these goblins who come to town selling fruit we talked a lot about prostitution and women in the victorian period and what christina rossetti herself was doing concerning this and what goblin market the poem was doing concerning this we talked about some feminist interpretations we talked about sisterhood we talked about karl marx but then in the end we did get to kind of talk about this again christian language and redemption and one of the sisters as his christ figure and this very um kind of savory tale and attitude and um how it's a bit of a moral obviously it's an allegory and it was just it was good i loved this poem so much quite a dark poem that we got to study near the end of this course was child roll into the dark tower came again by robert browning again this was a lot about remembering and the truth um it was it was just so good it's about this man oh my gosh he's so paranoid there's so much wrong with him he's stumbling through like this wasteland um to get to this tower and so many horrible things happened to him along the way uh it's just so gross and grimy and i loved it kind of this wasteland and the destitution um and just awfulness and apocalyptic state of waste that we ought to talk about in child roll into the dark tower came segwayed really nicely into the wasteland by t.s eliot all these are obviously very intentional decisions but um the wasteland very famous phone by t celia very hard i'm so glad someone sat me down and explained it to me we had a lot of classes about the wasteland because it's also quite a long poem um there's so much going on in it so many things that will like still take me years and years to process and think about of course it's been called a lot the best poem in the english language um i really liked it though the lecture he was just so great at explaining every single thing there's a lot of different languages used there's a lot of different religious political historical just everything going on again there's multiple voices happening which kind of people hadn't really seen in a set down poem until then so that was interesting lecture notes i'm remembering and seeing right now we got to talk about crisis theology existentialism we got to talk about kind of the league of nations that cropped up after world war one and then we got to talk about modernism again so everything just kind of moved in this really great circle which was so good we got to talk about some artistic innovations that were going on for the time for example analytical uh and then synthetic cubism where brock and picasso were concerned and then we also got to talk about time as well and the idea of time was kind of going on as well as the more natural elements because there's a lot of parts of the wasteland that deal with like fire and water and lightning and storms um and just different natural phenomena so that was really cool as well okay the work i want to spend the least amount of time on because i could think i can safely say it was my least favorite work to study in first year was heart of darkness by joseph conrad yes i've heard basically every other english major i've interacted with say the exact same thing that they detest despise never want to look at heart of darkness ever again i agree really did not like this um for a number of reasons which we got to talk about in class it was interesting but i just really really didn't like it heart of darkness is about a man who goes to the congo you get to see the devastating effects that king leopold of belgium has had uh on both the nature and the people there and what he's doing he's exploiting them taking all these resources all this really nasty awful horrible stuff uh yeah so the main thing we talked about in heart of darkness was obviously imperialism again because it finally just like bared its teeth and it was like the biggest thing in our course at this point which was such a good important thing to study it was definitely really really hard when we got to this point not only because joseph conrad's writing was just something i did not get along with at all we also got to talk about something that i found really interesting was that this kind of one-to-one relationship with things in this narrative and then in the words and language language used basically falls apart and breaks down because kind of words catch on to all these meanings that they can't shake off we talked about the ineffectiveness of language and the ineffectiveness of trying to communicate through language so yeah i kind of loved everything we peripherally talked about it with but i didn't like the work itself that leads me into my second least favorite work that we studied in this course which was as for me and my house by sinclair ross this is a piece of classic canadian literature my main problem with it was that it was like one of the driest most boring things i've ever read it's set in the prairies we're following this uh priest preacher as he moves to the prairies with his wife it's the most it's also the most depressing book i've ever read it put me in the biggest funk of my life i absolutely just i like zoned out in classes that we talked about it which never happens with me but i was just like i just hate every single thing about this book ever i would just definitely like not recommend reading it at all um and i'm so glad i literally never had to write on as for me in my house anywhere in this course which was amazing we're almost at the end but a very cool opportunity not really opportunity but place of study was black daisies for the bride which was at once a documentary and then we got a transcript of the documentary to read and this dealt so heavily with memory especially connected to the loss of memory and losing memory because black daisies for the bride is all about these women who are in nursing homes and they are losing their lives because they can't remember them it was so hard to watch so many people just straight up were just crying watching it it was really emotional dealt with a lot of issues especially the treatment of the elderly in nursing homes but it also offered a little bit of hope and kind of connection and redemption because it talks about how the language of poetry can bring memory back and poetry is often the last thing you remember snippets of songs and kind of how poetry serves the memory and the human brain better than prose does which was an interesting thought and then it asked the question as well is memory really the basis of identity because of course like you have these elderly people who are in these nursing homes but the memory they have of their life is gone but of course you wouldn't say they don't have an identity still they do it's just not the one they've always had so that was such an interesting thing to think about as well and then what was super interesting was that we stopped talking about the literature of it and then got to delve into the visual context and what the documentary itself was doing with obviously its colors and its cuts and its angles and it became a little bit of a film class for a couple weeks so that was fun two poems that we were given to basically just look at ourselves in preparation for the final exam were the onondaga madonna and to die name so we basically didn't talk about these all in class we just had to do our own self-study on it so those were those two and finally the last work that we looked at in this whole course was the mother of the muses by tony harrison this is also all about memory it's an absolutely beautiful devastating poem if you've ever read it it is just amazing this one begins after i've lit the fire and looked outside and found a snowbound and the roads all blocked anxious to prove my memory is not ossified and the way into that storehouse still unlocked as it's easier to remember poetry i tried to remember but soon find it hard a speech from prometheus a boy from greece bc scratched to help him learn it on a shard so good um and this one again just talked very very briefly was also about older people in nursing homes or people who are losing themselves because their memory and their mind is no longer keeping up with itself and it was really horrifying and scary and heavy um but yeah i just again offered so much hope and salvation through language oh my gosh all right i think i finally made it all the way through all 47 different works um i didn't really talk in detail about a lot of essays that we wrote how many hours i wrote if you guys would like any other university english degree videos always let me know because i do really really like talking about my experience and my degree because it's so fun for me i'm so glad that i get to say that school is fun because i just i love it so much um yeah so if you want to know anything else if there's anything you missed if you have any questions please always leave them down below if you have comments or inquiries or anything like that other than that i hope you enjoyed this is quite the long video i hope you had something yummy to drink or snack on um yeah it was just really fun going over my whole first year of university i feel so nostalgic about it now it was such a good course it still is one of like my favorite courses i've ever taken at uni was this enriched first year english course it just paved the way for this now and i love it um so yeah thank you so much for being here and i will see you in my next video ciao

Channel: * e m m i e *

Views: 617,441

Keywords: what an english major reads, english major, what english majors have to read, english major syllabus, syllabus english, english reading list, university english major, what does an english major read, english student reading list, books an english lit student reads, english major lecture notes, english literature student lecture notes, english lectures, classics reading list, first year english major, university tbr, booktube

Id: gzeDQDbJMAU

Length: 46min 15sec (2775 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 09 2020