This document summarizes the key topics covered in a university course on classic English and American literature over the past three months. It reviews the main themes explored in required readings such as ambition, guilt, and slavery. It also discusses how authors like Oscar Wilde viewed the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in their works. Additionally, it lists classic characters studied like Macbeth and their related ideas. The document concludes by stating that literature can help people grow intellectually, emotionally, culturally, and personally.

1. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
Classic Characters in English and American Literature
Rounding up the course
R.Baena
22.XI.2013

2. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
1. Students’ questions
2. Revising main themes in the required readings
3. Glossary of literary terms
4. What we should have learned after three months of intense
readings and class discussions…

3. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
2. Revising main concepts
A. Main themes in required readings
B. Literature and ethical criticism. Wayne Booth
C. Ethics and aesthetics in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray
D. Narrative emotions (students’s essays)

4. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
A. CLASSIC CHARACTERS
IDEAS
Macbeth
The Scarlett Letter
Benito Cereno,
Robinson Crusoe
The Great Gatsby
Dorian Gray
ambition, guilt, destiny
hypocrisy (Social and individual identity)
slavery (Master&slave dialectics)
encounter the Other (colonialism)
ambition (social status, control of time)
ambition, redemption

5. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
B. Literature and ethical criticism. Wayne Booth
Beyond formalism
Focus on reader and emotions
Ethical and political effects of artitistic forms
«Ethical criticism attempts to describe the encounters of a storyteller’s ethos with that of the reader or listener» (Booth 8).

6. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
Ethics and Aesthetics
“The artist is the creator of beautiful things… No artist has ethical
sympathies… All art is quite useless”
(Preface to The Picture of DG)
“
“My work will ultimately be recognized as a real work of art with a
strong ethical lesson inherent in it” (Oscar Wilde).

7. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
D. Narrative emotions (students’s essays)
Brideshead Revisited
Voices
The Loneliness of the of the LongDistance Runner
An Ideal Husband
The Screwtape Letters
The Catcher in the Rye
Nostalgia
oppressive nature of society
Sympathy and Loneliness
Hypocrisy and Irony
Pity and Self-identification
Hypocrisy and Nostalgia

8. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
3. Glossary of literary terms
(check ADI)
Theme
Narratee
Fiction
Focalisation
Turning point
Genre
Canon

9. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
4. What we should have learned after three months of intense
readings and class discussions…
Literature helps us grow:
Intellectually
Emotionally
Culturally
Personally

10. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
«Literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definitve
ethical and theological standpoint… The ‘greatness´of literature
cannot be determined solely by literary standards; though we must
remember that whether it is literature of not can be determined only
by literary standards» T. S. Eliot
«Poetry is capable of saving us» I.A. Richards