I. ASCRC General Education Form Group V Literary and Artistic Studies Dept/Program English / Literature Course # ENLT 218L Course Title British Literature: The Enlightenment and Romanticism Prerequisite None Credits 03 II. Endorsement/Approvals Complete the form and obtain signatures before submitting to Faculty Senate Office Please type / print name Signature Date Instructor Robert Baker 9/16/08 Phone / Email 243-6973 / rbaker@mtwi.net Program Chair Casey Charles Dean Jon Tomkins III. Description and purpose of the course: General Education courses must be introductory and foundational. They must emphasize breadth, context, and connectedness; and relate course content to students future lives: See Preamble: http://www.umt.edu/facultysenate/gened/gepreamble_final.htm Please see the attached syllabus for another version of this description. The course has three major purposes. The first is to introduce students to a sequence of major British writers from the Restoration through the end of the High Romantic period, as well as to some of the major historical events and circumstances to which these writers respond in their works (the restoration of the monarchy after the Puritan Revolution, the emergence of modern natural science and modern empiricist philosophy, the rise of an early version of political liberalism based in natural rights, the dominant political and philosophical trends of the Enlightenment, the take-off of the industrial revolution, the American and French revolutions, and so forth). The second purpose is to improve students ability to write clearly, critically, and imaginatively about literary texts: this obviously demands, at the same time, that they improve their ability to read perceptively. The third purpose which I hope is a purpose of any course I teach at the university is to awaken in students a greater appreciation for the value that a genuine engagement with literature can bring to the lives they do have to live. In other words, while a course like this one surely has an important training or skills acquisition function, I hope the course goes well beyond that, too, challenging students to reflect on their own values, their own bearings in the world, and to take seriously the larger vocation of self-knowledge and self-formation that has traditionally been at the center of a humanist or liberal arts education. IV. Criteria: Briefly explain how this course meets the criteria for the group. See: http://www.umt.edu/facultysenate/ascrcx/adocuments/ge_criteria5-1-08.htm
Courses cover a number of works in one or more of the various forms of artistic representation; they also establish a framework and context for analysis of the structure and significance of these works. In addition, these courses provide mechanisms for students 1) to receive instruction on the methods of analysis and criticism, 2) to develop arguments about the works from differing critical perspectives. The course unfolds in chronological sequence. It is shaped around a study of major period shifts (neo-classical, preromantic, and romantic) that correspond to major shifts in British society, culture, and literature shifts involving contradictions that are addressed as carefully as are the dominant or period-marking trends. Class discussions and written assignments encourage students to address the major political, philosophical, psychological, and literary transformations taking place in the texts we study from each period. Thus, for example, in our study of neo-classical poetry (in particular poems by Dryden, Pope, and Johnson, as well as the counter-voice, as it were, of Rochester), we examine the bent toward an alternately satirical and didactic poetry of point indicative of a more general cultural preoccupation in this period with order, measure, urbanity, and wit. We then explore the tension between this cultural current in the early eighteenth century and the emphatic or rough-and-tumble individualism expressed in the emergent English novel of the same time. Or, in our study of romantic literature (including major poems by Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, as well as a famous novel by Mary Shelley), we examine the ambivalent response of romantic writers to dominant pictures of self and society developed in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. This tension between enlightened and romantic bearings in the modern world, I try to help students see, is one of the major tensions in modern culture down to our own day. V. Student Learning Goals: Briefly explain how this course will meet the applicable learning goals. See: http://www.umt.edu/facultysenate/ascrcx/adocuments/ge_criteria5-1-08.htm
Upon completion of this perspective, students will be able to: 1. analyze works of art with respect to structure and significance within literary and artistic traditions, including emergent movements and forms; and 2. develop coherent arguments that critique these works from a variety of approaches, such as historical, aesthetic, cultural, psychological, political, and philosophical. The course, as I ve noted, unfolds in chronological sequence. Regular lectures provide historical and cultural contexts and sketch continuities as well as transformations between one cultural period and the next (the lectures are concentrated, first, at the pivotal historical turns in the temporal sequence, for example, the turn from the neo-classical to the pre-romantic and then romantic period, and second, at certain moments when we turn to a genre or sub-genre for the first time, for example, when we turn to the modern novel or to the romantic meditative poem). Class discussions are devoted largely to working through the structure and significance of specific poems and novels: close reading skills are both thematized and enacted in these discussions. The written assignments (three papers plus one rewrite) demand that students draw on what they ve learned in order to compose an interpretative essay about a specific work or on occasion two works. Students are invited (though not required) to draw connections among the different works studied in the course, and in general they readily take on the challenge. I should note that written assignments in the course usually encourage students to concentrate on the significance of specific texts. The reason for this emphasis is that, while I very much want students to be introduced to larger historical and cultural dynamics, I believe that, at this early stage in their studies, they write better papers, and so become more confident in their abilities as writers, through the experience of wrestling with particular texts. Also, to be sure, I think it is of great importance that students acquire close reading skills as early as possible: such skills will serve them well throughout their further years in college and, later, throughout their lives as adults in a democratic and cosmopolitan society.
That said, the course is indeed an introductory survey of British literary history from the 1660s through the 1820s. Students are thus expected to explore the various ways in which different traditions are retained, criticized, and reinvented over time. Thus, for example, in our study of romantic poetry, we attend to the way poets like Blake and Wordsworth rearticulate inherited Christian frames of meaning in secular or quasi-secular frames, as well as the ways their poetic adventures develop patterns of psychic growth that are in part recastings of the individualism of the eighteenth-century novel and in part responses to the social and political upheavals of the French Revolution. Or, in our study of the way certain romantic poets ambiguously turn to Nature as a point of meditative departure, we examine the way they at once retain an older literary practice (the appeal to Nature as a norm or ground) and radically tranform that older practice (taking Nature to be not a standard largely identical with literary tradition but rather a mysterious or sublime presence calling forth creative powers at odds with the dominant practices and discursive frames of a society entering into the industrial phase of modern capitalism). A basic goal of the course, then, is to expand students awareness of ways in which literary texts respond both to changing social circumstances (the horizontal level of response) and to models of self, society, nature, and representation inherited from older cultural traditions (the vertical level of response). Students, in other words, are introduced to the dialectic of repetition and transformation characteristic of any living tradition.
VII. Syllabus: Paste syllabus below or attach and send digital copy with form. The syllabus should clearly describe how the above criteria are satisfied. For assistance on syllabus preparation see: http://teaching.berkeley.edu/bgd/syllabus.html ENLT 218.01 History of British Literature: The Restoration, The Enlightenment, Romanticism Fall 2008 Robert Baker (243-6973 or 543-1045) TR 12:40 2:00 Office Hours: W 1:00 2:00, F 12:00 3:00 LA 203 or by appointment (LA 219) This course is an introductory survey of British literature from the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, at the end of the Puritan Revolution, through the eighteenth century or the age of the Enlightenment, through the Romantic period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. We will thus follow a trajectory from the 1660s through the 1820s. There are two other general ways of thinking about these periods that I would like us to bear in mind in this course. The Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 in England and the American and French revolutions of the late eighteenth century are sometimes called the first bourgeois democratic revolutions of the modern world. We will be studying literary works written at least in part in response to these revolutions. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment marked by a concern with scientific reason, technical progress, economic individualism, critical reflection, utilitarian ethical and political thought, and early conceptions of political liberalism and the Romantic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries marked by a concern with passion, imagination, creative self-shaping, quasi-religious transcendence, meditative openness to the natural world, and a utopian longing to reunify all that has been divided in our lives are two cultural frameworks whose multiple conflicts have continued to inform modern life and thought down to our own day. We will be undertaking an introductory exploration of these conflicts as they take shape in the British literature of these periods. At the end of the semester, if all goes well, you will have made an initial acquaintance with a number of important writers of British literature from the Restoration through the High Romantic period. I also want you to leave the course with an expanded confidence in your ability to think and write about poems and novels. One of my hopes is that each of you, over the next four months, will become not only a more perceptive reader but also a more articulate writer. The course requires a good deal of writing as well as a good deal of reading. I encourage you to meet with me throughout the semester to discuss your papers. I ll talk about the assignments in detail as we move along. Course Requirements Regular attendance and alertness Two quizzes Two short papers (5-7 pages) One rewrite of one of the short papers One longer final paper (6-8 pages) Required Texts Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Map of Course Nota Bene: nothing here is fixed in stone: there may be changes as we move along. T Aug 26 R Aug 28 Introduction Introduction John Dryden, Mac Flecknoe, A Song for St. Cecilia s Day, Alexander s Feast T Sept 2 John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, The Disabled Debauchee, The Imperfect Enjoyment, Upon Nothing, A Satire Against Reason and Mankind Annie Finch, The Introduction, A Nocturnal Reverie R Sept 4 Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders T Sept 9 R Sept 11 Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders T Sept 16 Joseph Addison, The Aims of the Spectator, Wit: True, False, Mixed, The Pleasures of the Imagination Alexander Pope, An Essay in Criticism R Sept 18 Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot T Sept 23 Alexander Pope, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot Samuel Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes R Sept 25 Cat, Thomas Gray, Ode of a Distant Prospect of Eton College, Ode on the Death of a Favorite Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard Christopher Smart, from Jubilate Agno William Collins, Ode on the Poetical Character, Ode to Evening *** Paper I Due *** T Sept 30 Introduction to Romanticism Charlotte Smith, sonnets from Elegiac Sonnets R Oct 2 Khan Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The Eolian Harp, Kubla
T Oct 7 R Oct 9 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The Eolian Harp, This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, Frost at Midnight, Dejection: An Ode William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey, Expostulation and Reply, The Tables Turned T Oct 14 R Oct 16 William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey, Ode: Intimations of Immortality, Elegiac Stanzas, Resolution and Independence William Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality, Elegiac Stanzas, Resolution and Independence T Oct 21 I R Oct 23 William Wordsworth, Resolution and Independence, Michael, Strange fits of passion have known, She dwelt among the untrodden ways, Three years she grew, A slumber did my spirit seal, I travelled among unknown men, Lucy Gray William Blake, All Religions Are One, There Is No Natural Religion [a] / [b], The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, A Song of Liberty *** Paper II Due *** T Oct 28 R Oct 30 Alastor, George Gordon, Lord Byron, Darkness, Manfred Percy Bysshe Shelley, To Wordsworth, Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, Mont Blanc or, The Spirit of Solittude, Ode to the West Wind, from A Defence of Poetry T Nov 4 R Nov 6 Election Day: no class Percy Byshhe Shelley, Adonais William Hazlitt, My First Acquaintance with Poets T Nov 11 R Nov 13 Veterans Day: no class John Keats, Ode on Indolence, Ode to Psyche, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Melancholy, To Autumn, and, also, When I have fears that I may cease to be, Bright star, would I were as steadfast as thou art, La Belle Dame sans Merci *** Rewrite Due *** T Nov 18 R Nov 20 John Keats, Ode on Indolence, Ode to Psyche, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Melancholy, To Autumn, The Fall of Hyperion, selected letters Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus
T Nov 25 R Nov 27 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein Thanksgiving Day: no class T Dec 2 R Dec 4 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein Review *** Paper III Due on Monday 8 December by 11:00 a.m. ***
Notes on Writing I. THE STRUCTURE OF AN INTERPRETATIVE ESSAY A. Introduction: introductory paragraph or paragraphs 1. Present a clearly shaped argument: let your reader know where you intend to go in your essay. 2. Construct a multidimensional guiding argument, an argument that includes multiple strands woven into a cohesive yet nuanced fabric: elasticity is of the essence. *Your introduction should serve as a map or a blueprint of your essay as a whole: the rest of your essay should unfold as the detailed landscape that this map indicates. B. Body: the development and substantiation of the argument 1. Conceptual Argumentation a. Try to unfold your argument through a clear and consistent use of concepts, clearly and precisely explaining the logic that carries your argument from one place to the next. b. Try to create echoes between one portion of your paper and another: these echoes will serve to connect specific points in your argument to your argument as a whole. 2. Textual Citation and Close Analysis of Textual Details a. Be sure to provide textual evidence in support of your larger claims. b. Be sure to elucidate with care the details of the textual passages you cite: do not leave your reader guessing as to how these cited passages support your argument. *Strive to create a balance in your essay between conceptual argumentation and close analysis of textual details. *Strive to construct a poised argumentative structure in which the parts communicate with the whole : provide a clear articulation of the connections you wish to establish in the argument. *AVOID: Mere paraphrase A series of random or disconnected observations Extensive textual citation in the absence of any argumentation Extensive argumentation in the absence of any close analysis of textual details C. Conclusion: concluding paragraph or paragraphs 1. Bring your argument to a close in a logical and cogent way. 2. At the same time try to conclude your argument by turning or opening it onto larger issues: you may want to draw attention to some of the broader implications of your argument, to some of the broader issues it raises, briefly underlining why your argument is important in some way that may not be immediately apparent to your reader. *AVOID: a flat restatement of the introduction.
II. REVISION *Revision is an essential element of all good writing: rewrite as you write. A. Grammar: pay attention to the basics: if in doubt, check a grammar book. B. Weave citations into your argument in a graceful way: do not, for instance, place a long citation smack in the middle of one of your own sentences. C. Do not overdose on the verb to be : a reliance on some of the other verbs in the language will lend precision and concreteness to your writing. D. Replace unwieldy constructions in the passive voice with lean constructions in the active voice: this will lend clarity and force to your writing. E. Practice the art of precision. F. Construct precise transitions between paragraphs (the global level) and between sentences (the local level): one of your tasks is to guide your reader through your argument, clearly marking the movement the various phases and turns of your thinking. G. Strive to create a fluent form of expression. *Always print out a complete rough draft of your paper, read through it carefully, and then rewrite the entire piece. It is difficult to get a sense of the whole of an argument if you do no more than gaze at its words as they ride up and down the computer screen. III. CONTEXT and AUDIENCE The form and the texture of any piece of writing are conditioned to a large extent by the context in which a piece is written, an important part of which context is the audience for whom a piece is intended: you should always bear this in mind while writing. This does not mean, of course, that any particular piece of writing may not find its way to audiences to whom it was not addressed: love letters and White House memos as well as speculative essays can indeed go astray and wind up in the hands, eyes, ears, and mouths of folks for whom they were not exactly intended. Accidents are part of the game perhaps an essential part. Nothing is written in a vacuum. IV. QUESTIONS and HORIZONS Why write at all? Why write interpretative essays? Why spend time and energy learning how to construct and shape a nuanced argument, how to handle words precisely and fluently, how to articulate your thoughts in an intelligible and persuasive fashion? What is the relationship between words and thoughts, between speaking and thinking, between speaking and writing? What do words do? How do they work? What is it that happens when they seem not to work, when they seem to fail us? How is it that words serve both to hurt and to heal, that at times they wreck us and at times restore us? *Food for thought: in what sense are words designative or descriptive? in what sense are they expressive or emotive? in what sense are they disclosive or creative? in what sense are they communicative or dialogical? in what sense are they pragmatic or performative? in what ways are they involved with the power to control or to dominate? in what ways are they involved with the power to act, to invent, or to make free? *Please note: As an instructor of a general education course, you will be expected to provide sample assessment items and corresponding responses to the Assessment Advisory Committee.