English Literature Syllabus

1

Understanding Literary Genres and Forms

1.1 Distinguishing prose, poetry, drama, and non fiction

1.2 Subgenres: short story, epic, lyric, satire

1.3 Narrative perspective: first, second, third (omniscient vs limited)

1.4 Linear and non linear plot structures

1.5 Setting and atmosphere: physical, social, cultural contexts

2

Literary Devices in Poetry

2.1 Metaphor, simile, and conceit — case study: John Donne, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

2.2 Imagery and symbolism

2.3 Personification and pathetic fallacy — case study: Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

2.4 Sound devices: alliteration, assonance, consonance

2.5 Allusion — case study: T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

3

Elizabethan and Renaissance Poetry

3.1 Shakespeare Sonnet 18

3.2 Shakespeare Sonnet 130

3.3 John Donne: Holy Sonnet 10

4

Romantic Poetry

4.1 William Wordsworth: I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

4.2 Percy Bysshe Shelley: Ozymandias

5

Victorian Poetry

5.1 Robert Browning: My Last Duchess

6

African Poetry

6.1 Theme: Identity; colonial aftermath; imagery. Case study: Refugee Mother and Child — Chinua Achebe.

6.2 Theme: Resistance; memory; political lyric. Case study: For Melba — Keorapetse Kgositsile.

7

Modernist Poetry

7.1 T. S. Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

7.2 Maya Angelou: Still I Rise

8

Advanced Rhetorical Analysis in Poetry

8.1 Ethos, pathos, logos in verse

8.2 Anaphora and epistrophe — case study: Maya Angelou, Still I Rise

8.3 Polysyndeton and asyndeton

8.4 Enjambment vs end stopped lines

9

Formalism and New Criticism

9.1 New Criticism: poem as object — applied to Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn

9.2 Rhyme and meter patterns — example: Shakespeare Sonnet 18

9.3 Objective correlatives — example: Eliot, Prufrock