This Gateway course studies the heroic and mock-heroic traditions in English poetry and drama, beginning with Shakespeare and ending with T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. Among our concerns: what constitutes "heroic" conduct? how are these values articulated? how is "the heroic" redefined in various works from different eras from antiquity to modernism? how is heroism challenged, complicated, and sometimes satirized by mock-heroic projects? how might heroic and mock-heroic elements coexist in a single vision? Such inquiries will be focused upon Shakespeare's Henry IV and Henry V, Milton's Paradise Lost, Pope's The Rape of the Lock, Byron's Don Juan, Browning's Aurora Leigh, poems by Tennyson, Yeats, and Eliot, and an episode from Joyce's Ulysses. Format: discussion/seminar. Requirements: 20 pages of writing in the form of weekly papers, alternating between journal entries and formal essays of three or four pages. Prerequisite: a 100-level English course, except 150. Enrollment limit: 19 (expected: 19). Preference to first and second-year students and majors who have yet to take a Gateway course. This course is writing intensive. (Pre-1700)