Random Masterpieces
I have entitled this course "Random Masterpieces." In it I will be teaching several different, unrelated works of literature that I believe are masterpieces, and that I have always wanted to teach. We may disagree about which are masterpieces, but I think we can agree that truly great literary works are awesome, triumphant achievements. The schedule: Day 1: Beowulf. Day 2: T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land. Day Three: Coleridge, Kubla Khan, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Rossetti, Goblin Market. Day Four: Wilde, The Importance of Being Ernest. Day Five: Poems by W. B. Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost. Day Six: Speeches by Lincoln, M.L. King, J.F. Kennedy, plus one. Day Seven: Dramatic Monologues, mostly Robert. Browning, also Tennyson. Day Eight: Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God. There may be changes. The lists of poems and speeches will be available in class and on line. All the works except Their Eyes Were Watching God are available online. Please come to class Day One having read Beowulf (preferably in the Seamus Heaney translation).
Lorch, Thomas
Thomas Lorch’s great love is teaching literature. He has taught 7th grade through graduate school for more than twenty years. Quick bio facts. Education: New Trier High School, Yale (B.A., Ph.D.), University of Chicago (M.A.). Teaching: The Groton School, The University of Notre Dame, and others. Long time public high school principal. “I find teaching and sharing literature always exciting and always fresh and new, because every reader and every reading is different. I see reading as a creative act, as a two-way conversation between the work being read and the reader, in which he or she creates alongside the author. My approach to teaching great literature is to look as closely as possible at the texts themselves. What makes great literature great is that there is always more to find.”