Winter Quarter 2007– The Age of Romanticism
Assignments and Updates

(Assignments are posted beginning with the most current)

Catalyst

Reading and Writing the Romantic Age

March 5

Reading: Manfred. We had a great discussion with Gary Handwerk on Wednesday evening about the way Caleb Williams is a novel about ideological determinism--the way social and political ideologies have a way of putting us in glass prisons--with bars we don't see, but which are nevertheless just as effective as--indeed, maybe even more effective than--iron ones. Manfred is written almost 25 years after CW, and in it Byron offers a different kind of a hero--not one free of ideological chains necessarily, but one who seems to know he is in them, and frames his actions as the struggle to free himself of his chains even if it costs him his life. It is a "closet drama"--a play written to be read, not to be staged. It's not long--but it's full of iconoclastic speeches. Many of Byron's works were phenomenally successful, both on the continent as well as in England, but this one was certainly among his most successful. He didn't capture all of the age, but he sure connected with a big part of it!

Writing: First, the schedule makes the Portfolio due on Monday. But given all the class we've missed, and the helter-skelter of the end of the quarter, I will extend the due date for the portfolio until the Monday of Finals week, March 12.

For Monday, find a passage of sonnet length in the play's last act that seems to you to be a powerful Manfred Moment--a moment in which Manfred gives voice to his will to transcend the bounds of ideological control and become his own full self--even if it means his death and damnation. Quote your lines, and then explain them. Why do you like these lines? How do they do the work of challenging the almighty spirits of all heaven and all earth?

February 28

More on Caleb Williams. No explicit writing for tonight--but we will have a review quiz on Romantic themes (for which you can prepare by reviewing the Romantic Conversations link at the top of the page in RWRA) and Caleb Williams--all of which will result in a set of questions to raise to our Mystery Guest, who will arrive at 8pm.

February 26

Reading: Caleb Williams. The whole if you can do it; through volume two at least....

Writing: I listed in class four master narratives that Godwin uses to structure his story: Identity, The Fall, The Great Wrong Righted, and the Discovery/construction of the self. In describing them I wanted to give you thematic routes, as it were, to follow as you make your way through this extraordinary book. I then asked you to locate and describe in book 2 or 3 of the novel a "quintessential" moment in the process of one of these master narratives. As one example, I pointed to Falkland's dis-owning of his quasi-son Caleb early on in the novel. Beyond being an event in the story, that moment also represents a move in the identity narrative, in which two things happen. First Caleb becomes (again, as he is in the book's opening) identity-less, and thus finds it necessary to look again to the question of who he really is, and he learns that one route to identity, that of identifying with a "father" and adopting his "nature," as it were, is not open to him. There opens in this scene not just an argument between the two, but a vast gap between anything Falkland could ever be and anything Caleb could ever be.

I hope that explanation is not too opaque. But whether or not, have a go at finding in your reading a quintessential moment in one of the four master narratives, and we will look next time at what you have found, as well as where you found it.

February 21

Reading: See February 14th--tonight we will be doing the Hemans and Landon we were going to do on the 14th. We actually spent the entire class on the 14th slowing down in order to talk more fully than we otherwise could have both about the RSP proposals and about the midterm. On the Blackboard and Reading and Writing the Romantic Age pages I've posted three things that formed the basis of that conversation: English 330: Criteria for Papers in the Class; The Grid (click here); and Notes towards the RSP (click here).

Writing: First edition for the RSP (click here for the full assignment). We will also be taking up the writing you did for February 14 on Hemans and Landon.

February 19

NO CLASS--Presidents' Day Holiday

February 14

NOTE: During Monday's class I handed out a copy of an RSP done the last time I taught this class; I had a fancy plan for using it. But that plan won't work. So instead of whatever I told you in class, we will spend about fifteen minutes on this paper in class on February 14. (My special valentine to you!) What I'd like you to do is read the paper, then reread the Romantic Survival Project assignment, and finally write just two sentences: 1. What (if anything) in this paper seems particularly strong? 2. What (if anything) in this paper left you wanting more information, or feeling unclear about the argument, the exposition, or any thing else? (If you missed class on Monday, you won't be able to do this--you'll have to catch up on Wednesday.)

Reading: Hemans, Casabiana, The Homes of England, A Spirit's Return. Landon, The Proud Ladye, Love's Last Lesson, The Little Shroud.

Writing: In reading the assigned Hemans or Landon poems, imagine that you do not know their authors are women. Could you figure that out from anything in any one of the poems you read? If so, how might you know just by the poem itself that its author was a woman? How is "women's" poetry here any different from "men's" poetry? If not, then imagine where someone else might think they could tell, and you then explain why in your view that wouldn't be evidence enough. (There is not necessarily any "right" answer here; this is a question aimed at sparking reflection and exploration.)

February 12

Reading: Keats: Ode to a Nightingale, To Autumn. Shelley: Mont Blanc.

Writing: Nominations for RSP texts due--response paper length. NO MORE THAN TWO PAGES! You can either submit them as hard copy printouts, or you can submit to me via e-mail as embedded files.

So What does this Mean? This means I want you to propose to me what "contemporary" work you'd like to use as the focus for your Romantic Survivor Project. The assignment describes what you need as "a recent cultural artifact that in your view depends either directly or ironically on major Romantic themes or concepts." This doesn't have to be a "perfect" example--as I also say in the assignment: "In evaluating the artifact you select it will matter to me less how perfect your example is than how well and how extensively you bring your understanding of romantic themes and conversations to bear in your discussion."

Your proposal should explain as well as you can what you see surviving from the romantic age in the work you nominate. Were you proposing Pirates of the Caribbean, you might talk about freedom by recovery as a powerful theme--or indeed, any of the many that showed up on epost the night we did the movie. You should also try to describe what you think is NOT romantic about your work.

February 7

Midterm. This will be an e-midterm. I will post the exam to the website at approximately 6pm, and I will email a copy to you at the same time. Your job is to write the exam--within the space limits I will include--and submit it to me in an email, with your answer embedded in the email, and NOT included as an attachment, by 9pm. Anything posted after 9 will incur a lateness penalty. I'll go over these technical details in class on Monday.

February 5

Reading: Keats, The Eve of St Agnes. NOTE: this is less reading than I'd first planned for you--and that reflects my sense that as we approach the midterm we need a class more tightly focused on the problem of reading this poetry well.

Writing: Your task for Monday:

To help you get into the poem, here are a few preliminary observations about The Eve:

This is a poem full of eroticism, paradoxes, Romantic themes. Keats gives us a plea for life in the face of death; images of richness and embellishment, of the phantasy deployed to build a world around the ordinary, transcend the limits of normal perception in order to make rich and full an otherwise cold and frightened existence. He builds a world of myth, or superstition, of supernatural wishes, of youth still innocent, yet somehow also informed with the world’s cautionary experience.

We get a series of Keatsian paradoxes and contrasts: Frieze vs. freeze; cold vs. hot; gray and white and frost against porphyry. But all are balanced against the sense of the power of what they rebel against—it is home, parents, convention, the power represented by castles and ritual and church and, even, death itself. It is a wonderful dream, but can it be sustained? Will it last?

Note that the poetry here calls for a kind of transcendence, but it’s not a transcendence like either Coleridge or Shelley; rather it’s a transcendence made by art—it is the Pleasure Dome without the connection to a pantheistic metaphysical presence. It really does seem entirely secular, a set of very powerful tricks of thought, taking their energy from erotic drive. One begins with the powerful creative drive of eros towards beauty, pure sensuality, isolation, complete absorption in another—to a kind of “truth” in the full absorption into a state of feeling, loving, counter-thinking available through art, and from there one resolves upon action--or at least, that's how the story here goes. We will want to ask finally about this poem: does it simply create for us another kind of beautiful Grecian Urn, something to contemplate, to "read" in order to achieve a heightened understanding, or does it also provide a vision and a rationale for action?

January 31

Reading: Keats: On first looking into; On Seeing the Elgin Marbles; When I have Fears; La Belle Dame Sans Merci; Ode on a Grecian Urn.

Writing: I will assign you a stanza of the Ode in class. I want you (having read the whole of the poem) to do a what/why analysis of your stanza, and then go on to propose a project statement for your stanza. In a VERY SHORT paragraph, end your response by explaining which of the four short lyrics you are also reading for tonight most closely shares Keats' project in the Ode.

January 29

Reading: Shelley: 1. To Wordsworth; Ozymandias; England in 1819; Ode
to the West Wind; To a sky-Lark; When the lamp is shattered.

2. Having read 8-10 postings (or more) on the class E-Post site, be ready for an inclass quiz on which of today's poems might best be chosen as an analog for Pirates.

January 24

Reading: NO ASSIGNMENT!!!!!! Catch-up on Coleridge evening, along with an introduction to the RSP via Pirates of the Caribbean.

Writing: An E-POST class assignment: click on the Catalyst link above, and that will take you to the class E-Post bulletin board. Once there, post up to one full screen full nominating an appropriate analogue text to Pirates of the Caribbean. Post this paragraph NO LATER THAN 8:00 am MONDAY.

January 22

Reading: Coleridge: Dejection, an Ode, and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. RWRA: "Romantic Conversations: Things the Romantics Loved to Talk About" (Accessible through the link at the top of the Reading and Writing the Romantic Age page)

Writing: Of the two poems for today, the Rime is probably the easier to read, even if it’s long. The don’t look alike, they don’t feel the same. Yet in many ways they ARE the same—or at least, the work, or project, each undertakes share a great deal—and that is a resolve to encounter and even explore “the Dark Side.”

I talk about that aspect of Romantic literature in “Romantic Conversations: Some Things Romantic Writers Loved to Write About.” Read that section if you haven’t already, or reread it if you have, and pick a stanza-length segment from either poem (a 4-6 line segment of the Ode) that seems to you to be engaging with “the dark side.” What do you notice in the stanza about Coleridge’s poetic choices, and why (i.e., with what sense of the work he wants this stanza to do) does he make them?

January 17

Reading: Coleridge, Eolian Harp, Kubla K; RE Chap 1 Quiz. (Start RE Chaps 3-4). And though I haven't said anything about this before, you should be reading as a matter of course the introductions to each of the authors we read--very helpful in getting a sense of the interpretive ballparks their poetry plays in.

Writing: These two poems, as different as they seem, can be understood as having very similar projects. Develop and write out a project statement for one of the two, and then explain as best you can first how the poem goes about effecting that project (don't worry if this sounds really difficult--we'll be talking more about project statements on Wednesday), and second, locate a place in the other poem that seems to be doing the "same" sort of thing.

NOTE: We spent the class last Wednesday evening working on the notion of project statement. I talk about it in RWRA in section III--in the So What section. Talking about the "project" of a poem is a way of talking about the cultural work it is doing, and a "project statement" is simply a sentence or two that states clearly what you think a poem's project is. The example I use in RWRA is "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"--we spent time in class on Wednesday talking that poem through and showing how one might go about creating an argument about what it was doing. The snow prevented some of you from getting to class so you missed that. You also missed our working through "Nutting," but you can get a good sense of our discussion there by re-reading the last section of the "Wordsworth on Poetry" essay where "Nutting" is specifically addressed.

That may sound like a lot to work through before our next class, but you do have a full week. So do what you can with this writing assignment, working from the pages I spend on poetic projects in RWRA. We'll return to this (obviously) next Wednesday. We'll begin by picking up "Resolution and Independence," and then go on to Coleridge.

Finally, when you read "Kubla Khan" be sure you read the notes which precede it as well as the actual "poem."

January 10

Reading: Wordsworth, "Nutting," and "Resolution and Independence." RWRA: Section V: Worthsworth on Poetry.

Writing: For "Nutting," pick two lines you find interesting--either together or singly. Type them out and explain what interests you. For "Resolution and Independence," pick a stanza you find interesting, type it out and explain (again!) what interests you.

(Keep in mind: you don't have to be giving me "truth" or "wisdom" here--I'm just asking you to find something you like, and to explain as fully as you can why you like it. This isn't about being "right"--it's about finding a way to engage intelligently with the reading.)

January 8

Reading: Wordsworth, Lines Written; Expostulation; Strange fits; She dwelt among; Three years; A slumber; Lucy Gray; I wandered; My Heart Leaps.
RE: Start Intro and Chap 1. RWRA: Sections I, II, and III. (Quiz on
RWRA)

Writing: Pick one of the lyric poems you are reading for today, look at it closely, and locate three What's, and then for each, write a paragraph describing as fully as you can, and in as many ways as you can, Why you think Wordsworth made the choice he did.