Language&Literature. A grammar list book - Sorin Ivan

The Course Language & Literature. A Grammar List Book focuses on a few specific aspects of English that always need attention: nouns with a special regime in the agreement with the verb, verbs and adjectives with compulsory prepositions and irregular verbs. Each morphological category is developed, in a practical and pragmatic perspective, in two lists of examples from literature. The nouns, the verbs and adjectives with prepositions and the irregular verbs are “tracked” in literary contexts. It is an academic approach that makes a connection and an alliance, spectacular in its essence, between language and literature in order to study the language through literature. Going beyond the theoretical and abstract approaches, the course has an essentially pragmatic character, as it views the language from the literature’s angle. The examples given are not merely academic, technical and abstract samples any longer, sometimes undermined by artificiality, but facts of language, vivid examples of the literary language, from famous literary works, of great writers.

Thus, treating grammar gets a bit more credibility, bearing the endorsement of literature, and, why not, more linguistic power through the foundation in complex contexts of language and communication. It is a linguistic and literary pragmatism that has the meaning and purpose of looking at the language elements as natural facts and realities that are part of the English language and of the communication in English. The literature comes to sustain this approach as a prestigious support. This perspective, within the alliance between language and literature, is developed in the second part of the course, in a mini-anthology of literary texts, excerpts from famous works. This section is addressed through a practical scale, by which the literary texts are treated as a support for the study of English, but not any support, but a famous cultural one. Here are some authors and titles, among many others: D. H. Lawrence: Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Virginia Woolf: The Waves, James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Thomas Hardy: Tess of the D’Urbervilles. A Pure Woman, Joseph Conrad: Lord Jim, Nathaniel Hawthorne:  The Scarlet Letter, Oscar Wilde:  The Picture of Dorian Gray, Charles Dickens: Great Expectations, John Galsworthy: The Forsyte Saga, Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady, Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights etc.

The fundamental objective of the Course Language & Literature. A Grammar List Book is to develop proficient communication skills in English to the students at the bachelor’s and master’s programmes in the areas of social and human sciences and humanities, but also in other fields of academic study and research. In fact, it addresses to all those who study English in university programmes. In the context of this particular approach, the course stake is a double and complex one: both linguistic and cultural. Grammar is an opportunity for attending the great literature, and literature is a gateway to the world of language. Addressing the English language through literature helps students expand their cultural horizons by the fact that readers thus enter the fabulous universe of English and American literature. Further, understanding of the language facts is made by the “skilled” and seductive support of literature. Essentially, the book is an academic challenge to language and literature, in other words to language and culture, amid a global scale challenge: English.

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