This tutorial-intended primarily for sophomores-explores elegies as a literary genre. In their most familiar form, elegies honor and memorialize the dead. More broadly conceived, the genre includes works lamenting other kinds of loss as well-the loss of a lover, place, country, or cherished version of one's past. We'll consider the special challenges and opportunities of the elegiac voice: how it manages to give public expression to private grief; negotiates problems of tone and perspective; worries about and celebrates the capacity of language to generate hope and consolation; and seeks a kind of solace in the literary effort to evoke, preserve, or rewrite a lost life or an absent past. This course focuses primarily on poetry, English and American, across a broad historical range. We'll first read poems from 1600-1900-including works by Jonson, Milton, Donne, Dryden, Gray, Shelley, Tennyson, and Whitman, and then turn to some of the twentieth-century's great poetic elegists-Owen, Yeats, Auden, Lowell, and Heaney. Finally, we'll consider how the elegiac voice works in fiction, especially in stories by Joyce "The Dead" and Nabokov "Spring in Fialta." Requirements: Students will meet with the instructor in pairs for an hour each week; they will write a 5-6 page paper every other week (five in all), and comment on their partners' papers in alternate weeks. Emphasis will be placed on developing skills not only in reading and interpretation, but also in constructing critical arguments and responding to them in written and oral critiques. Prerequisite: a 100-level English course, except 150. Enrollment limit: 10 (expected: 10). Preference to sophomores.