10b Syllabys

ENGLISH 10b: MAJOR BRITISH AUTHORS, 1688-2008

SPRING 2009

Harvard Hall 201 MW noon-1pm + one-hour section Stephen Burt [email protected] Office tel. 6-0285 Office: Barker Center 014; office hours TBA Alternate mailbox: English Department office, first floor, Barker Center URL: www.accommodatingly.com

ABOUT THIS COURSE It's a speedy, capacious introduction to the last three centuries of British and Irish literature, with stops at most of the major poets, and a few of the great or influential prose writers and dramatists, of the period. You will about those major authors, about how they sometimes responded to one another, and about their times. You'll learn what comes before what, who comes before who—that is, an outline of literary history; you'll also, and more important, read, and get the chance to write about, individual poems, novels, plays and essays that stand up well today. The course complements English 10a, and both together meet requirements for the English concentration; however, you need not have taken 10a first, nor are there other prerequisites—I have designed this course with people new to the study of English literature, or new to the study of poetry, in mind. You'll write three graded papers and two non-graded imitations or parodies. Each of the papers will take up one of the challenges described at the end of this syllabus; you may pick any three challenges, in any order, as long as you meet the requirements of each challenge you choose. Each of the three papers counts for 20% of your grade. The final exam counts for 20%. The rest of your grade (20%) comes from class participation, including your presence and participation in section, your performance on a few brief quizzes, your imitations or parodies, and any other creative assignments (which can only make your grade up, never down). Assignments are due at 4pm on the date the syllabus gives, in my mailbox outside my office or wherever else your TF wants them to go. If you think you will need an extension on a deadline you should ask for one in advance, and be prepared to give a reason: late papers for which no arrangements were made in advance go down by half a grade per day.

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ENGLISH 10b , SPRING 2009: SYLLABUS BOOKS REQUIRED: Norton Anthology of English Literature, eighth edition, vols. C through F. (If you already own volume I of the two-volume set, you need only buy volume II, whose contents are identical to volumes D through F.) Jane Austen, Persuasion (Norton Critical edition preferred, but if you already own another, that's fine; Austen and the Norton, C through F, should be available together for a big discount if you buy them all at the Coop). Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (also available at the Coop, but widely available elsewhere; any edition is fine) Caryl Churchill, Far Away (you'll probably need to buy this one at the Coop) All required readings below come from Norton except for the book-length works by Austen, Woolf and Churchill. WED JAN 28 INTRO MON FEB 2 [Norton volume C] Dryden, "To the Memory of Mr Oldham," "A Song for St. Cecilia's Day"; Rochester, "The Disabled Debauchee," "The Imperfect Enjoyment," "Upon Nothing," "A Satire Against Reason and Mankind"; Swift, "The Lady's Dressing Room," part 4 from Gulliver's Travels ("A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms"); Mary Wortley Montagu, "The Reasons That Induced Dr. Swift to Write a Poem Called the Lady's Dressing Room" WED FEB 4 Swift, "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift"; Pope, "The Rape of the Lock," "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot" MON FEB 9 Gay, The Beggar's Opera; Leapor, "An Essay on Woman"; Samuel Johnson, ""On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet," Rambler 5 (on spring) Idler 31 (on idleness), Rambler 4 (on fiction) WED FEB 11 Johnson, "Preface to Shakespeare," "A Brief to Free a Slave"; Gray, "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College," "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"; [Norton volume D] Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience, especially (in Songs of Innocence) "Introduction," "The Ecchoing Green," "The Lamb," "The Little Black Boy," "The Chimney Sweeper" and (in Songs of Experience) "Holy Thursday," "The Chimney Sweeper," "Nurse's Song," "The Tyger," "The Garden of Love," "London"; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell MON FEB 16 NO CLASS PRESIDENTS' DAY

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WED FEB 18 Burns, "To a Mouse," "To a Louse"; Wordsworth, "Simon Lee," "We Are Seven," "Lines Written in Early Spring," "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey," preface to Lyrical Ballads; Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," "Frost at Midnight," "Kubla Khan" THURS FEB 19 FIRST PAPER DUE MON FEB 23 Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," "The Solitary Reaper," "London, 1802," "The world is too much with us"; The Prelude, book 1; Coleridge, "Dejection: An Ode," excerpts from Biographia Literaria chapters 4, 14, 17; Clare, "Mouse's Nest," "I Am" Recommended (but not required): Wordsworth, "Thought of a Briton," online at http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww333.html; J. K. Stephen, "A Sonnet" (parody of Wordsworth), online at http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/2008.html; Thomas Hood, "A Parental Ode," online at http://www.accommodatingly.com/?page_id=662 WED FEB 25 Hazlitt, "On Gusto"; Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto 1; Shelley, "Ozymandias," "England in 1819," "Ode to the West Wind," excerpt from A Defence of Poetry; Keats, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," "When I have fears," "Bright star" MON MAR 2 Keats, "Bright star," "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn,""To Autumn," "This living hand," letters (all); Austen, Persuasion, chs. I-XII WED MAR 4 Austen, Persuasion, chs. XIII-end THURS MAR 5 FIRST IMITATION OR PARODY DUE MON MAR 9 [Norton volume E] Mill, "What Is Poetry?"; Barrett Browning, "Sonnets from the Portugese" (all those included in Norton); Tennyson, "Ulysses," "Tithonus," "Locksley Hall"; FitzGerald, "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam"; Emily Brontë, "Remembrance," "No coward soul" ; Arnold, "To Marguerite—Continued," "Dover Beach" WED MAR 11 Tennyson, excerpts from In Memoriam A. H. H. (all) MON MAR 16 Robert Browning, "My Last Duchess," "Fra Lippo Lippi," "Andrea del Sarto"; Arnold, "The Scholar Gypsy," "The Study of Poetry," "Literature and Science"; Huxley, "Science and Culture"

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Recommended (but not required): Arnold, "Memorial Verses," "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" (in Norton) WED MAR18 Christina Rossetti, "When I am dead," "Cobwebs," "Winter," "In an Artist's Studio," "Up-Hill," "Goblin Market," "In Progress," "A Life's Parallels," "Something this foggy day," "Cardinal Newman"; Swinburne, "Hymn to Proserpine"; Michael Field, "To Christina Rossetti," "Nests in Elms" THURS MAR 19 SECOND PAPER DUE SPRING BREAK MON MAR 30 Pater, excerpts from Studies in the History of the Renaissance; Hopkins, "God's Grandeur," "The Starlit Night," "As kingfishers catch fire," "The Windhover," "Spring and Fall," "No worst, there is none," "Thou art indeed just, Lord"; Wilde, "The Critic as Artist" Recommended (but not required): Hopkins, "The Wreck of the Deutschland," online at http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1051.html WED APR 1 Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest MON APR 6 Kipling, "Recessional," "The White Man's Burden"; [Norton volume F] Hardy, "Neutral Tones," "Drummer Hodge," "The Darkling Thrush," "Channel Firing," "During Wind and Rain," "In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations'"; Housman, all six poems in Norton; Edward Thomas, "Adlestrop," "The Owl"; Gurney, "The Silent One"; Owen, "Miners," "Dulce et Decorum Est," "Disabled" WED APR 8 Yeats, "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," "Who Goes with Fergus?" "Adam's Curse," "The Fascination of What's Difficult," "September 1913, "Easter 1916," "The Wild Swans at Coole," "The Second Coming," "A Prayer for My Daughter," "Leda and the Swan" THURS APR 9 SECOND IMITATION OR PARODY DUE MON APR 13 Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium," "Lapis Lazuli," "The Circus Animals' Desertion"; Joyce, "Araby"; Woolf, "The Mark on the Wall," "Modern Fiction"; Stevie Smith, "Our Bog is Dood," "Thoughts about the Person from Porlock"; Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"

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WED APR 15 Woolf, Mrs Dalloway MON APR 20 Mansfield, "The Garden Party"; Auden, "Petition," "On This Island," "Lullaby," "Musée de Beaux Arts," "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," "Sept. 1, 1939," "In Praise of Limestone," "The Shield of Achilles"; MacNeice, "Bagpipe Music" Recommended (but not required): Auden, "In Memory of Sigmund Freud," online at http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15543 and "The Fall of Rome," online at http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15546; much more on Auden at http://www.audensociety.org/index.html WED APR 22 Larkin, "Church Going," "Talking in Bed," "High Windows," "Sad Steps," "Homage to a Government," "The Explosion," "This Be the Verse," "Aubade"; Hill, excerpts from Mercian Hymns (all), "The Laurel Axe"; Harrison, "National Trust," "Marked with D." MON APR 27 Churchill, Far Away; Ramanujan, "Elements of Composition"; Gunn, "My Sad Captains," "Still Life"; Heaney, "Digging," "The Forge," "Punishment," "Clearances"; Muldoon, "Meeting the British," "Milkweed and Monarch" WED APR 29 LAST CLASS Wrap-up, exam review, poems and other works we left out TUES MAY 5 THIRD PAPER DUE FINAL EXAM DATE AND TIME TBA

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CHALLENGES/ ASSIGMENTS FOR ENGLISH 10b:

Your graded papers for this course should take up any three of these challenges, in any order you like. Each of the papers should contain a clear and well-supported argument that shows your attention to the work, or works, you discuss. You may not repeat a challenge, and you may not write about the same work twice; you probably should not write twice about the same author. If you have a topic you want to pursue that does not fit any of these challenges, you should speak with your TF, or with me. A. Show how one literary work we read for this course responds to, answers, or counters, another. What assumptions—about form, about audience, about society, about language—do both works share? B. Describe the speaker (the persona who speaks) in one work of any length that we read for this course. What is he like, and how do we know? What impression of herself does she give, and how? To whom does this persona speak? Is there an implied author distinct from the persona who speaks? If there is one, what can we say about her? C. Describe the external form of a poem (long-lined free verse, tetrameter couplets, etc.); then explain how the poem uses that form, why it sounds as it does. (You may, or may not, refer to other poems, from Norton or from anywhere else, that use the same form, from the same or from earlier eras.) D. Read the memoirs, the diary, or the posthumously published letters of an author whom we have read for this course; then show how passages, ideas, or events described there support an argument about that author's poetry, drama or fiction. E. Pick a historical event and show how a work we read for this course responds to it. F. Describe a theory of literature put forward by one of the authors we read—either a theory implicit in a poem, play, short story or novel, or a theory made explicit in a critical essay from Norton: what does this author imply, or state, that literature in general should be or do? Then describe some consequences of that theory: what does it disparage, encourage, rule out? Does it fit—or does it attack—works by other authors from the same period? from other periods? G. Pick one word or phrase prominent in one or more works (it might be a phrase that the work, or its characters, repeat). Show what that word or phrase does, why it matters, and how the meanings and implications in that word unfold. (You might want to use the Oxford English Dictionary, as some of you did in 10a, but your argument must go beyond the elucidation of meanings the OED gives for that word.) H. Explain what's funny about a work we read, and how the other effects that the work contains might support (or undermine) its comedy.

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I. Pick an author we read for this course; using at least one work on the syllabus and at least one work not on the syllabus, describe that author's style. How can we tell her work (if no label were given) apart from work by anybody else? J. Pick a work for the stage and explain how you would stage it—with reference to speaking styles, actors' body language and blocking, sets, costumes, lighting, music, and/or props: your explanation should advance some argument about that work, what it means or what it does. K. Consider the examples and the discussions of some other art form—painting, sculpture, music, cuisine, architecture—within a poem, a novel or a play. How does that art form differ—according to that work—from literature? L. Using the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, or else a reference work akin to it, define one of these literary terms: elegy, satire, bildungsroman, farce, ekphrasis, allegory, pastoral, ode. Then show how a work we have read meets, fails to meet, or otherwise responds to your definition. M. Select a work of any length, in English, written between 1688 and 2008, by a British or Irish author who is not included in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, and explain why that work belongs in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, and why it should be on the syllabus for this course. *

A good argument in literary studies almost always contains some notion of correlation, aesthetic connection, causality, or historical consequence—a "because," an "although," an "in order to," or a "therefore," either implicit in your paper, or stated outright in your thesis. If you cannot find, for yourself, the "because," the "therefore," or the "although" in your thesis, you may want to change your argument. A good argument in literary studies usually takes some account, somewhere, of genre, subgenre, organization or style—of why the text has these words (rather than synonyms), in this order (rather than another), at this length, arranged and presented as they are: if you do not address such matters in your thesis, you should likely bring them up somewhere, as evidence, within the papers you write. Two papers should be at least 4-7 pages long, or at least 1,200 words; the third should be at least 6-10 pages, or at least 1800 words. You are welcome to write longer papers, but the longer it is, the better—and more concise—we will expect your writing to be.

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themes throughout: duty, clarity, civility, "prose virtues" vs individual fulfillment, imagination, liberty public civic vs private idiosyncratic language; received or conventional vs organic form a quartered grid: public language, shared form, generalizable morals (neo-classic, Johnson) public language (shared with a public, intended for a public), shared form, but idiosyncratic, private experience (Wordsworth, Arnold, Christina Rossetti? Emily Bronte? Clare?) idiosyncratic, new or organic form and language, but potentially generalizable experience, experience you can have too, as in religious or revolutionary doctrine (Hopkins, Shelley) idiosyncratic form and language for idiosyncratic experience, "create my own system" (Blake) third axis: moral-prescriptive vs. amoral-descriptive-representational

post-religious, non-consensus society: can anything take place that religion supposedly had? should it? revision, secondariness, coming-afterwards

Eliot from Mill on duty vs. fulfillment (epigraph to syllabus?) natural verifiable empirical public vs supernatural subjective individual private (to what extent do poets work within those binaries and how or when do they complicate them? which side is religion, experience of nonhuman nature, sex?) reflected in form: same form, same truths? or new form, new truths, maximal individuality for new work? how do these questions affect diff genres differently? urban/ rural, England/ Celtic fringe?

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