last modified 12/30/08
| Wes
Chapman English House 205 556-3090 wchapman@iwu.edu |
Office Hours: |
Continuity and Change in British Poetry is a self-conscious survey of the poetry of three periods of British literature: 18th Century, Romantic and Victorian. As a survey, the course will introduce you to many of the major British poets of these eras. As a self-conscious survey, the course will raise questions about the nature and content of these literary historical categories. For example, we might ask, how is Romantic poetry different from late 18th Century poetry, and what were the causes of the change? What do we do with a poet like Blake, whose poetry has both 18th Century and Romantic characteristics? Would this way of dividing literary history still hold if we were to focus on women's poetry as a distinct literary tradition?
Required:
Useful but not required:
Your grade will be based upon the following:
All work will be graded on a 0-100 scale, where 90-100 = A, 80-89 = B, 70-79 = C, 60-69 = D, and 0-50 = F. The highest three numbers in a range are equivalent to a plus grade (e.g. 87-89 = B+); the lowest three are equivalent to a minus (e.g. 90-92 = A-).
Attendance: No more than 4 absences for any reason, including illness and university sponsored events, are allowed. I will deal with attendance problems on a case-by-case basis, but I reserve the right to lower your final grade by one third of a grade for each class missed beyond the 3 course limit.
Participation in discussion is important in this class. Although there is no separate grade rubric for participation, active, thoughtful participation in class will raise a borderline grade, while passive or disruptive participation will lower one. (A borderline grade is defined as a grade within .5 of a point of the cutoff between two grades. For example, 90 is the cutoff between B+ and A-; 89.5 - 90.5 is the borderline range between the two grades.)
Late work: Your grade on a late assignment will be lowered by 3 points (out of 100) for every calendar day it is late, up to a maximum of 30 points. Because an F at 50 will bring down a grade much less than an F at 0, it is nearly always better to turn in an assignment late than not to turn it in at all.
Plagiarism will affect your grade in one of two ways. If you turn in a paper which is plagiarized in minor or unintentional ways (e.g. you use the language of the source you are writing about without quotes), the paper will receive a 0, and we will discuss plagiarism until it is clear that you understand what it is and how to avoid it. You may be able to rewrite such a paper for a higher grade if there is enough time left in the term. However, if you turn in a paper which is plagiarized blatantly, or at length, or with apparent intent to deceive, you will receive an F in the course regardless of any other grades you have received, and I will file an Academic Dishonesty Report with the Associate Provost.
All readings are from The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eighth Edition, unless otherwise noted. Section and author headnotes or multi-authored sections are indicated with the abbreviation NAEL followed by page numbers. You should also read headnotes to poems which have them.
Th 1/8 Introduction
T 1/13 Augustan satire:
a representative poem. NAEL 853-878; Swift, "A Description of a City
Shower"
W 1/14, 7 PM -showing of Ridicule
Th 1/15 Why satire? discussion of Ridicule
T 1/20 NAEL 971-973; Swift, "Verses
on the Death of Dr. Swift" (online at <http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/verses.html>)
Th 1/22 NAEL 1120-1124;
Pope, "An
Essay on Criticism"
T 1/27 Pope, "The
Rape
of the Lock"
Th 1/29 catch-up day or on to female neoclassical poets
T 2/3 The women write back.
Poems TBA.
Th 2/5 A representative
Romantic
lyric. NAEL 1363-1384; Wordsworth, "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern
Abbey" FIRST
PAPER DUE
T 2/10 NAEL
1484-1487; Wordsworth, "We
Are Seven," "Expostulation and Reply," "The Tables Turned," "Preface
to the Lyrical Ballads," "A Slumber Did my Spirit Seal," "I
Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," "My Heart Leaps Up," "The World
is Too Much with Us"
Th 2/12 NAEL 1388; Barbauld, "A Summer Evening's Meditation," "The
Rights of Woman," "Washing-Day"
T 2/17 NAEL 1609-1611;
Coleridge, "The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner," "Kubla Khan," "Frost at Midnight"
Th 2/19 NAEL 1820-1822;
Keats, "The Eve of St. Agnes, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," "Ode
to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "To Autumn"
T 2/24 catch-up day or
on to the late 18th C
Th 2/26 MID-TERM EXAM
T 3/3 But wait--didn't
we
skip a half a century? NAEL 1210-1212; Johnson, "The Vanity of Human Wishes"
Th 3/5 NAEL 1330, 1337-1338;
Gray, "Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat," "Elegy Written
in a Country Churchyard"; Cowper, "The Castaway"
T 3/10 NAEL 1406-1409;
Blake,
all poems from from Songs of Innocence and of Experience (NAEL 1410-1425)
Th 3/12 Blake, "The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell"
T 3/17 - Th 3/19 SPRING BREAK
T 3/24 A representative
Victorian
dramatic monologue. NAEL 1885-1905; R. Browning, "Andrea Del Sarto"
Th 3/26 NAEL 1921-1922;
E.
B. Browning, all selections from Sonnets from the Portuguese and Aurora
Leigh (NAEL 1926-1927, 1934-1948)
T 3/31 NAEL 1948-1951;
Tennyson, "The
Lady of Shalott," "The Lotos-Eaters," "Ulysses" SECOND
PAPER DUE
Th 4/2 NAEL 2051-2054; R.
Browning, "Fra Lippo Lippi," "An Epistle Containing the Strange
Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician" (online at <http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/274.html>).
T 4/7 The Victorians and
religion. NAEL 2091-2095; Arnold, "The Forsaken Merman, "Dover Beach," first
two paragraphs of "The Study of Poetry"; Tennyson, In Memoriam 56;
Browning, "Karshish" again
Th 4/9 Pre-Raphaelites
and fellow travellers. D.G. Rossetti, "The Blessed Damozel" (online
at <http://www.wwnorton.com/nto/victorian/topic_3/damozel.htm>;
NAEL II 1605-1606; Morris, "The Defense of Guenevere" (online at <http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1501.html>;Swinburne, "Hymn
to Proserpine" (online at <http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/2088.html>, "Laus
Veneris" (online at <http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/2092.html>
T 4/14 C. Rossetti, "A
Triad," "In an Artist's Studio," "Goblin Market" POEMS
AND DISCUSSION DUE
Th 4/16 catch-up day
T 4/21 last day of class
Th 4/23 8 AM - 10 AM FINAL
EXAM
Pertinent to the midterm:
Pertinent to the in-class section of the final (for the take-home section, the whole class is relevant):
my teaching notes. See the caveat above.