DOCSLIB.ORG

Course Guidebook

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Course Guidebook nd The History of the English Language, 2 Edition Parts I–III Professor Seth Lerer THE TEACHING COMPANY ® PUBLISHED BY: THE TEACHING COMPANY 4151 Lafayette Center Drive, Suite 100 Chantilly, Virginia 20151-1232 1-800-TEACH-12 Fax—703-378-3819 www.teach12.com Copyright © The Teaching Company, 2008 Printed in the United States of America This book is in copyright. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of The Teaching Company. Seth Lerer, Ph.D. Avalon Foundation Professor in Humanities and Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Stanford University Seth Lerer is the Avalon Foundation Professor in Humanities and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He holds degrees from Wesleyan University (B.A., 1976), Oxford University (B.A., 1978), and the University of Chicago (Ph.D., 1981), and he taught at Princeton University from 1981 to 1990, when he moved to Stanford. Dr. Lerer has published 10 books, including Chaucer and His Readers (Princeton University Press, 1993) and Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language (Columbia University Press, 2007), and he is the author of more than 100 scholarly articles and reviews. Professor Lerer has received many awards for his scholarship and teaching, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation, the Beatrice White Prize of the English Association of Great Britain, the Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association, and the Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching at Stanford. ©2008 The Teaching Company. i Table of Contents The History of the English Language, 2nd Edition Professor Biography.....................................................................................................................................................i Course Scope................................................................................................................................................................1 Lecture One Introduction to the Study of Language ...............................................................................2 Lecture Two The Historical Study of Language......................................................................................6 Lecture Three Indo-European and the Prehistory of English.....................................................................9 Lecture Four Reconstructing Meaning and Sound.................................................................................12 Lecture Five Historical Linguistics and Studying Culture.....................................................................15 Lecture Six The Beginnings of English ...............................................................................................18 Lecture Seven The Old English Worldview.............................................................................................21 Lecture Eight Did the Normans Really Conquer English?......................................................................25 Lecture Nine What Did the Normans Do to English? ............................................................................28 Lecture Ten Chaucer’s English.............................................................................................................31 Lecture Eleven Dialect Representations in Middle English ......................................................................34 Lecture Twelve Medieval Attitudes toward Language...............................................................................37 Lecture Thirteen The Return of English as a Standard ................................................................................40 Lecture Fourteen The Great Vowel Shift and Modern English ....................................................................43 Lecture Fifteen The Expanding English Vocabulary.................................................................................46 Lecture Sixteen Early Modern English Syntax and Grammar....................................................................49 Lecture Seventeen Renaissance Attitudes toward Teaching English..............................................................52 Lecture Eighteen Shakespeare—Drama, Grammar, Pronunciation..............................................................55 Lecture Nineteen Shakespeare—Poetry, Sound, Sense ................................................................................58 Lecture Twenty The Bible in English .........................................................................................................61 Lecture Twenty-One Samuel Johnson and His Dictionary.................................................................................64 Lecture Twenty-Two New Standards in English.................................................................................................67 Lecture Twenty-Three Dictionaries and Word Histories ......................................................................................70 Lecture Twenty-Four Values, Words, and Modernity.........................................................................................73 Lecture Twenty-Five The Beginnings of American English...............................................................................76 Lecture Twenty-Six American Language from Webster to Mencken...............................................................79 Lecture Twenty-Seven American Rhetoric from Jefferson to Lincoln..................................................................82 Lecture Twenty-Eight The Language of the American Self.................................................................................86 Lecture Twenty-Nine American Regionalism .....................................................................................................89 Lecture Thirty American Dialects in Literature........................................................................................92 Lecture Thirty-One The Impact of African-American English ........................................................................95 Lecture Thirty-Two An Anglophone World .....................................................................................................98 Lecture Thirty-Three The Language of Science ...............................................................................................102 Lecture Thirty-Four The Science of Language ...............................................................................................106 Lecture Thirty-Five Linguistics and Politics in Language Study....................................................................110 Lecture Thirty-Six Conclusions and Provocations........................................................................................113 ii ©2008 The Teaching Company. Table of Contents The History of the English Language, 2nd Edition Timeline....................................................................................................................................................................117 Glossary....................................................................................................................................................................120 Biographical Notes...................................................................................................................................................124 Bibliography.............................................................................................................................................................126 ©2008 The Teaching Company. iii iv ©2008 The Teaching Company. The History of the English Language, 2nd Edition Scope: This course of 36 lectures surveys the history of the English language, from its origins as a dialect of Germanic- speaking peoples, through the literary and cultural documents of its 1,500-year span, to the state of American speech of the present day. In addition to surveying the spoken and written forms of the language over time, the course also focuses on larger social concerns about language use, variety, and change; the relationship between spelling and pronunciation; the notion of dialect and variation across geographical and class boundaries; the arguments concerning English as an official language and the status of standard English; the role of the dictionary in describing and prescribing usage; and the ways in which words change meaning, as well as the manner in which English speakers have coined and borrowed new words from other languages. The course is in three parts. Part I focuses on the development of English in its earliest forms. We begin with the study of Indo-European, the posited 5,000-year-old original from which the modern and classical European, Iranian, and Indian languages emerged. From Indo-European, the lectures move to the Germanic branch of languages and to the Anglo-Saxons who settled the British Isles beginning in the 5th century. Old English emerges as the literary vernacular of the Anglo-Saxons and flourishes until the Norman Conquest in the mid-11th century. The interplay of English, French, and Latin from the 11th to the 15th centuries generates the forms of Middle English in which Chaucer, among others,
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Sharon Marcus
    x SHARON MARCUS COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY • DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE • NEW YORK, NY 10027 256 WEST 10TH STREET, 1B • NEW YORK, NY 10014 • 646.981.7194 • [email protected] EDUCATION 1995 Ph.D., The Johns Hopkins University, Humanities Center, Comparative Literature 1986 B.A., Brown University, Comparative Literature (Honors) EMPLOYMENT 2014– 2017 Dean of Humanities, Arts and Sciences, Columbia University (3-year term) 2008– PRESENT Orlando Harriman Professor, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University 2007-2008 Professor, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University 2003-2007 Associate Professor, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University 2003– PRESENT Affiliated Faculty, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University 2003– PRESENT Affiliated Faculty, Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Columbia University 1998-2003 Associate Professor, English, University of California, Berkeley 1994-1998 Assistant Professor, English, University of California, Berkeley FELLOWSHIPS, GRANTS, AND PRIZES 2017-18 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship 2017-18 Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study fellowship 2017-18 Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship in the Humanities 2015-17 Mellon Grant for Center for Spatial Research, Co-PI (with Laura Kurgan), 2016 Provost's MOOC Grant, "The Great Novels," Co-PI (with Nicholas Dames) 2015-17 ACLS Public Fellows Grant for Public Books, Co-PI (with Caitlin Zaloom) 2014 Public Voices Fellowship, The Op-Ed Project, Columbia University 2014-PRESENT Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities 2013-2017 Administrative Internship Program grant, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University (to provide graduate students with alt-ac training via Public Books) 2011 Jerome Lawrence and Robert E.
    [Show full text]
  • Fashioning Change Discovers a Late Medieval World in Which Garments Could Express Fortune's Instability, Aesthetic Turmoil
    “Fashioning Change discovers a late medieval world in which garments could express fortune’s instability, aesthetic turmoil, and spiritual crisis. Fashion was good to think. In lucid and compelling detail, Andrea Denny-Brown reveals just how and why the dress of ecclesiastics, dandies, wives, and kings figured mutability as an inescapable worldly condition.” —Susan Crane, professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, and author of The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity during the Hundred Years War “Fashioning Change is one of the most original and inventive studies of medieval cul- ture I have read. It is a book about the experience of social desire, the nature of civi- lized life, the relationships of craft and culture, and the aesthetics of performance. More than just a book about fashion, it is about fashioning: the self, society, and poetry. It is, therefore, a study of how medieval writers fashioned themselves and their worlds through an attentive encounter with the arts of bodily adornment. Engagingly written and scrupulously researched, Fashioning Change will be a signal contribution to the field of medieval studies.” —Seth Lerer, Dean of Arts and Humanities and Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of California at San Diego “It is rare to find a book that casts its nets widely while meticulously analyzing the texts it discusses. This book does both. Denny-Brown provides insight into philosophical texts, cultural symbolics in textual and visual art, religious and theological texts and practices, Middle English poetry, and national identity, which taken together makes the book an invaluable index to medieval—not just Middle English—notions about fash- ion, philosophical approaches to change, gender dynamics, and aesthetics.” —Maura Nolan, University of California, Berkeley “Denny-Brown draws on texts of many genres as well as historical information to show that fashion—and the promise of fortune that accompanied it—had great appeal for men and women in the Middle Ages.
    [Show full text]
  • DATING BEOWULF Series Editors: Anke Bernau, David Matthews and James Paz Series Founded By: J
    DATING BEOWULF Series editors: Anke Bernau, David Matthews and James Paz Series founded by: J. J. Anderson and Gail Ashton Advisory board: Ruth Evans, Patricia C. Ingham, Andrew James Johnston, Chris Jones, Catherine Karkov, Nicola McDonald, Sarah Salih, Larry Scanlon and Stephanie Trigg Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture publishes monographs and essay collections comprising new research informed by current critical methodologies on the literary cultures of the Middle Ages. We are interested in all periods, from the early Middle Ages through to the late, and we include post-medieval engagements with and representations of the medieval period (or ‘medievalism’). ‘Literature’ is taken in a broad sense, to include the many different medieval genres: imaginative, historical, political, scientific, religious. While we welcome contributions on the diverse cultures of medieval Britain and are happy to receive submissions on Anglo-Norman, Anglo-Latin and Celtic writings, we are also open to work on the Middle Ages in Europe more widely, and beyond. Titles available in the series 15. The Scottish Legendary: Towards a poetics of hagiographic narration Eva von Contzen 16. Nonhuman voices in Anglo-Saxon literature and material culture James Paz 17. The church as sacred space in Middle English literature and culture Laura Varnam 18. Aspects of knowledge: Preserving and reinventing traditions of learning in the Middle Ages Marilina Cesario and Hugh Magennis (eds) 19. Visions and ruins: Cultural memory and the untimely Middle Ages Joshua Davies 20. Participatory reading in late-medieval England Heather Blatt 21. Affective medievalism: Love, abjection and discontent Thomas A. Prendergast and Stephanie Trigg 22. Performing women: Gender, self, and representation in late-medieval Metz Susannah Crowder 23.
    [Show full text]
  • Download PDF Version of CV HERE
    Deanne Williams Department of English York University 4700 Keele St. Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3 Email. [email protected] Tel. (416) 736-2100 ext. 44752 Employment History July 1, 2016-Present. Professor of English, York University, Toronto. July 1, 2003-June 30, 2016. Associate Professor of English, York University, Toronto. July 1, 2000-Present. Member of the Graduate Program in English. York University. July 1, 2000-June 30, 2003. Assistant Professor of English, York University, Toronto Education Ph.D. English Literature, Stanford University, 2000. Dissertation: Coming To Terms: The Trouble with French in Early Modern England. M.Phil. Medieval English Literature, Oxford University, 1994. B.A. (Hons) English Literature and Religious Studies, University of Toronto, 1992. Honours and Special Recognitions 1. President’s Research Excellence Award, York University, 2019. 2. Fellow, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, University of Toronto, 2018- present. 3. Fellow, Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, 2018-2019. 4. Alice Griffin Fellowship in Shakespearean Studies, University of Auckland, Summer 2018. 5. Elected to the Royal Society of Canada, College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists, 2017 6. Visiting Scholar, Facultat de Filologia, University of Barcelona. February, 2017. 7. Visiting Scholar, Department of English, Lund University. November, 2013. 8. Roland H. Bainton Prize for Best Book in Literature from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference, 2005, for The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare. 9. Clare Hall, Cambridge. Visiting Fellowship, 2004-5. Elected Life Fellow, June, 2005. 10. Guest Professor, Johannes Gutenberg – Universität, Mainz, 2002. 11. John Charles Polanyi Prize in Literature, 2003. 12. Visiting Scholar, Trinity College, Cambridge.
    [Show full text]
  • 39Th Annual Meeting in Bellevue, Washington, 2011
    SHAKESPEARE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA PROGRAM OF THE 39TH ANNUAL MEETING 7–9 APRIL 2011 THE HYATT REGENCY BELLEVUE, WASHINGTON 76874_SAA.indd 1 3/24/11 11:41 AM The 39th President RUSS MCDONALD Annual Goldsmiths College, University of London Meeting of the Vice-President Shakespeare SUZANNE GOSSETT Association of Loyola University Chicago America Immediate Past President PAUL YACHNIN Executive Director McGill University LENA COWEN ORLIN Georgetown University Trustees REBECCA BUSHNELL Memberships Manager University of Pennsylvania DONNA EVEN-KESEF Georgetown University HEATHER JAMES University of Southern California Publications Manager BAILEY YEAGER DOUGLAS M. LANIER Georgetown University University of New Hampshire LYNNE MAGNUSSON University of Toronto ERIC RASMUSSEN University of Nevada JAMES R. SIEMON Boston University 76874_SAA.indd 2 3/24/11 11:42 AM Program Planning Committee Sponsors of the 39th Annual Meeting HEATHER JAMES, Chair University of Southern California THE VANDOLSEN TRUST MICHAEL DOBSON Birkbeck College, University of London THE UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON HEIDI BRAYMAN HACKEL THE UNIVERSITY OF OREGON University of California, Riverside THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA VALERIE WAYNE University of Hawai’i THE OREGON SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL ADAM ZUCKER University of Massachusetts VANCOUVER ISLAND UNIVERSITY WESTERN WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY Local Arrangements THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA AT MICHAEL SHURGOT OKANAGAN South Puget Sound Community College THE UNIVERSITY OF PUGET SOUND REED COLLEGE SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY THE UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA AND GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY 1 76874_SAA.indd 1 3/24/11 11:42 AM 2011 Program Guide Thursday, 7 April 10:00 a.m. Registration in Evergreen Foyer 7 12:00 noon Book Exhibits in Evergreen Ballroom 7 1:30 p.m.
    [Show full text]