תקצירי קורסים – החוג לשפה ולספרות אנגלית

In this class we will begin by briefly tracing the roots of American culture, moving from the early settlers, the Declaration of Independence, etc. Thus establishing key motifs within the American canon, for the remainder of the course we will concentrate on 20th and 21st century manifestations, rejections, or revisions of these ideas. Here we will be reading both shorter and longer texts, as well as watching some films.

An introduction to the life and times of William Shakespeare. This course will give students the tools to cope with Elizabethan English, and to understand the historical, religious and cultural contexts in which Shakespeare wrote. Students will learn to love Shakespeare’s lines, and also gain an understanding of the enormous cultural importance of his work. The material will include a selection of sonnets, and an analysis of some of Shakespeare’s greatest works.

This course introduces the students to the huge canon of English Literature, and inspires them to study further, through examining selection of texts that span the history of English Literature, placing the work in historical context.

Students acquire the tools to cope with a range of texts and to understand the huge impact that writers have had on modern Western culture, giving the students both a love of the literature, and an understanding of the enormous importance of the work.

The material includes a selection of plays, poetry and novels from the last thousand years. Students will get an overview of the literature (and life) of the past centuries, and an overview of some of the weightiest texts in the English canon.

This course will examine the components of a short story, play and novel and study the elements of writing: style, language, message, setting, literary elements, characters, plot etc.

The course will include an overview of how literature taps into the eternal themes of human existence: conflict, love, nationalism etc. We will investigate the different genres of writing and how they are linked to the author's intention and message.

"Slowly I Dream of Flying" is the creation of a computerized poetry-generator called Racter. Would you consider it a poem even though it was written by a computer or, as they call it, a "poet-bot"? Indeed, on what grounds do we classify a text as a poem?

This course aims to provide you with the basics of poetry analysis. Guided by the assumption that the pleasure of literary texts is greatly enhanced by knowledge, the course seeks to provide well-illustrated accounts of the major aspects of poetry and the full range of terminology currently in use in the discipline of literary studies.

​From its inception as a literary genre, the English novel has been associated with the 'new' – hence novel. This course explores the interrelations of the English novel with modernity throughout its shifting historical, cultural and literary contexts. The first semester will introduce the key forms, themes and styles which gave rise to the novel as we know it through the writings of key authors, from the Reformation to 19th century novels. In the second semester, this wide-ranging introduction will enable us to delve into the experimental writing characterizing the modernist and post-modern novel of the 20th and 21st centuries.

​The course introduces students to the history, forms, themes, and uses of literature written especially for children and young adults. In this course we will advance chronologically, reading and analysing some of the classics of children's literature as well as contemporary works. We will learn to evaluate children's verses and stories as literary works and read them critically in their historical, socio-political and philosophical contexts. The course introduces students to the dark history of nursery rhymes, the uses of magic, the serious side of nonsense, and the psychological depth of fairy tales.

​This online course examines how African American literature explores black identity and constitutes its unique aesthetics. It also explores how the cultural products of the black tradition reflected on and helped to shape American culture and literature as we know it today. The course introduces representative texts of African American literature, beginning with the oral tradition and autobiographies written by ex-slaves in the 18th century, through to inspirational and provocative texts of the present day.

​This course provides an introduction to the emergence and use of literary theory. It surveys the major schools of 20th and 21st century literary criticism ranging from Russian Formalism and New Criticism to Post-Structuralism and Post-Colonialism. Emphasis is on the continuity of key ideas in the history of criticism and on a comparative approach to theory.

​This course will give students the skills and vocabulary they need in order to read, discuss, write about, and teach plays in English. We will treat plays as both independent literary texts to be read closely, and as scripts that are meant to be performed on stage and screen. We will discuss the history of theatre with an emphasis on Greek drama, theater in Shakespeare’s time, and modern theater. While this course is an introduction to drama as a genre, it will also focus on one of the most dramatic aspects of human lives: love, passion, and marriage.

Minority Literature is the writing produced by those who are excluded from mainstream society for reasons such as nationality, ethnicity, race, gender identity, or sexual orientation. The course will examine the repercussions of writing from such positions through the close reading of fiction, memoirs, and poetry by minority groups. The course will include four sections: Native American writing, immigrant writing, gay and lesbian writing, and theories of minor literature. All together, the course will provide students with important tools for understanding, writing about, and teaching literature from the fringe of the traditional canon.

​For more than a century, the study of Romantic poetry in English was modeled upon a canonical list of six male poets called "the Big Six" – Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Byron. But the Romantic canon changed dramatically over the last decades. The emergence of feminist and new historicist criticism in the 1980s has challenged the traditional view of English romanticism and broadened this field of study by including poetry written by women, naïve poets from the labouring classes, and even escaped black slaves.

The aim of this course is thus to introduce the Romantic revolution with some 'poetic justice,' by incorporating poetry written by those left outside the traditional Romantic canon – women, self-taught and working class poets – which are still in the process of being rediscovered.

This course focuses on the identity reconstruction of women in relation to diegetic and extradiegetic spaces in fictional texts and poems aiming at bringing together the space(s) of house/home, mental spaces, border spaces and spaces of violence and hostility.

One of the key features of the contemporary culture is that it unfolds on a global level; it includes (or seems to include) the whole world. The course will seek to show how writers have dealt with globalization in their writing, covering themes like colonialism and post-colonial state, immigration, tourism, and the new digital environments. Through close reading of poetry and essays, students will encounter these themes and practice their literature analysis skills.