01/08/09 Introduction

T: read syllabus, Swift "Shower," excerpt from Virgil's Georgics, Intro to Rest and 18th C in NAEL (853-878). Intro is slow going, but read it as carefully as you can bear--includes material that could be very useful for later assignments and which I might test on the midterm (as a general rule, everything is fair game for the midterm and final--anything we've read, whether we talk about it or not, and anything we've said in class).

W 1/14 evening, 7 PM: watch Ridicule here in this classroom. If you can't make it at that time, the film is on reserve in the library; just make sure you've seen it before Thursday.

About the course: two goals

• offer a sampling of some of the major texts and authors of British poetry from the neoclassical to the Victorian periods.
• help you develop a mental map of English literature as a whole. We aren't actually going to talk about English literature as a whole--only three different periods out of 8 to 10 there are--but we'll cover fairly long and important span of time and we'll try to do so self-consciously enough that you'll have some idea of what lies outside that period of time.

Why the latter? Example: "Let Nature be your teacher." What does this mean? What could it mean?

• Nature as wilderness
• word once had sexual connotations: could mean genitals or semen in late Medieval era; still persists in Shakespeare as double entendre
• nature in 18th C sense, as "that which is permanently true." This sense survives to some extent in phrases like "human nature" or "the nature of things."
• nature in Romantic sense, as wilderness or that which is not manmade, but with connotations of having a divine presence or force underlying it.
• post-Darwin?

All of this is to say that context makes a very big difference, something that all of you know. But these contexts aren't just local, i.e. particular to certain poem or a certain author. The word "nature" could certainly be used in different ways by different authors writing at the same time, or by the same author writing at different times. But in general, "nature" means something very different in the 18th C than it does in the Romantic era, and although "nature" is an especially loaded word, LOTS of things, not just that one word, change from era to era.

I'd like to make two points about this. The first is, since we all HAVE a map of literature in our heads, some vision of all the literature that we know of in some kind of order, and since we all DO apply whatever we already know to whatever we are reading for the first time, it is a good idea to have as good a map as possible and to apply it as thoughtfully--as consciously--as possible. It helps to know that "Let Nature be your guide" is from Wordsworth's "The Tables Turned." But for that to be fully meaningful, one has to know that Wordsworth was a Romantic and to know something about what that means. Concepts like "Augustan" and "Romantic" tell us a very great deal very quickly.

The second point is that time doesn't come neatly split up into periods. It's not the case that in 1785 everyone suddenly stood up and said, "let's all be Romantic." And that observation leads to all kinds of questions. When did the word "nature" change its meaning? Was there ever some kind of "in-between" meaning of the word, or a time when the word had both meanings? How do things change? If there is slippage between the different eras, as one would expect, can we trust these mental maps that we have formed?

In this class, we'll ask about these kinds of things. We'll be looking at three periods--the neoClassical, the Romantic, and the Victorian, as well as the transition period between the two most different ones. We'll try to develop our mental maps of these eras, and we'll try to figure out how far we can trust such maps by looking at the borderline cases.

Today: want to get out what we do know already—build a kind of "before" picture that we’ll compare to at the end.

But first: an icebreaker—designed to get us over the embarrassment of exposing our ignorance. each person

• tell us your name, major, and anything else you want us to know.
• give the name of one work of literature that you haven’t read but think you probably "ought" to have read. By that I mean a work of literature that is so "major," or so widely read, that one could argue that any literate person, and especially any English major for those who are, ought to know it. (Premise from David Lodge.)

Next: a map of English literature.

name any literary fact: the name of a work, the name of an author, the name of a literary period. Give as close a date as you can get, if you know a date. Left is early; right is recent. I won't correct errors if I see any, although you all can do so; therefore what we do in this class only will not be covered on the midterm and may not be accurate.

Next time: Will begin discussion of each literary period except the late 18th C with a representative poem. For the Neoclassical section, the poem I've chosen is "A Description of a City Shower," by Jonathan Swift. It's a mock form, about which I'll say a lot more on Tuesday, and specifically, it's an imitation of Virgil's Georgics--even called that in one manuscript.

• What's a Georgic? the Georgics were poems by Virgil, the classical Roman poet who lived in the first century BCE, which praise rural life. They are explicitly didactic, giving lessons on farming and various moral concerns. (The word "georgic" comes from Greek and later Roman words for "husbandman," or farmer.)
• The sample I've handed out is a part of the first Georgic describing a shower. Note the parts that tell what signs to look for of coming rain--Swift imitates this quite directly.
• As you're reading the poems, ask yourself how Swift is using the older form.