Blake's "Ancient of Days"Blake's "Newton"Blake's "Ancient of Days"
Blake's "Ancient of Days" and "Newton," from Wikimedia Commons


ENGL5402: Literary Theories In/Of Romanticism
Mondays, 4:05-5:55pm
McCain1170

Julia M. Wright
julia.wright@dal.ca
McCain 2193
office hours: Tuesdays, 2:00-3:00pm; Fridays, 1:00-2:00pm; and by appointment

NB: This is a coursepage only, for general information; the official syllabus will be circulated in class, and will include a list of contents of the course packet.


This course will survey a number of the debates and key texts essential to the study of Romanticism, including material from the Romantic period (c. 1780-1837) on authorship, representation, aesthetics, genre, and mode, with some attention in the final weeks to major approaches to Romantic literature in the twentieth century.  In dealing with fundamental theoretical and methodological questions in literary study, it will also be relevant to students interested in literary periods immediately before and after Romanticism.  It will, for instance, complicate the dominance of realism in literature and populist misconceptions of poetry as expressive. Each week’s readings in the historical overview section (weeks 3-10) concludes with a recent work of criticism in order to situate the Romantic-era readings in relation to contemporary critical discourse.

Textbooks:
Assignments (all written work is due at the start of class on the duedate):
General Principles:
Seminar papers and essays should engage scholarship on the subject and/or texts under consideration (with understandable limits on how wide a research survey you can do, given time constraints); use the MLA Bibliography to finetune searches of the available criticism, as well as feel free to consult with me after doing so.  Keep in mind, too, that recent works of scholarship will generally have useful bibliographies and notes which address the major critical works on particular subjects or texts, and so reading the most recent article on a topic can often lead you most effectively to useful sources.  Pay attention as well to the form of the scholarly essays you are reading; you can learn not only from their substance, but also from how they are written, from effective argumentation to how to structure a long essay, what goes into notes and what doesn’t, and the terms on which to acknowledge the work of others while distinguishing your own from theirs.

Most importantly, remember that the main point of the research is to bolster and help you develop your argument as your contribution to scholarly discussion: if a critic has already proven a point about the text that you need to make your case, you can cite that critic’s conclusion and save the space you would have used to prove it to address other points; if a critic has made a similar point about another text by your author, then you can cite the critic and establish how it can be extended to your text; if critics have settled on a point that you wish to contest, then you can cite them to lay the groundwork for what your argument adds to the discussion; if a critic is using a theoretical approach irrelevant to yours or discussing an aspect of the text that is unrelated to your interests, there probably isn’t much point in citing that critic’s work.
Because of the priority of your argument—as the subject of your essay, and as a key component on which you will be graded—it is vital that you clearly distinguish between your ideas and words, and those of others. Consequently, all work must be fully and properly documented according to a recent edition of the MLA Handbook.  Also see the Faculty of Graduate Studies calendar on the principles of Intellectual Honesty for the importance of properly acknowledging sources (http://gr.cal.dal.ca/UREG.htm):  both quotations and paraphrases must be followed by page references and clearly indicate the author of the source, for all sources (including material from the literary and critical texts used in class); all duplicated wording must be placed in quotation marks or, in the case of quotations over four lines, offset as per MLA guidelines; all  ideas incorporated from other sources must be acknowledged through citation; and all sources (literary, critical, theoretical, historical, etc.) must be included in your Works Cited.  Paraphrase should only be used to reduce lengthy material (i.e., a page or two) down to a pithy sentence; trying to transform thirty words in the original to twenty or twenty-five words of your own is an utter waste of your time and energy, and often leads to plagiarism.  QuotationsBof theory, of literature, of criticismBare the evidence on which our discipline proceeds, and so have significant value in your work as quotations. If you have any questions about proper documentation, please ask me over e-mail, in class, or in my office.

N.B.: I reserve the right not to accept an assignment that is not fully and properly documented:  if it is not accepted, then it will not be graded and will not count as a completed assignment, and it may also, if evidence warrants it, be reported to FGS as required under university policy.  If a response paper is not accepted, it will not count towards your total and you will have to write another one; if a seminar or essay is not accepted, you will have to submit a corrected version within five days. There is room for occasional oversights and formatting errors, so no assignment will be refused because of minor carelessness or misunderstanding of MLA style.  But significant duplication of wording without quotation marks, unattributed paraphrase or quotation, and/or incomplete Works Cited constitute a fundamental failure to meet the basic expectations of university-level research in our discipline. These fundamentals of research should already be familiar to you from your undergraduate degrees, but will also be discussed in the first class, along with “best practices” for handling online research; these fundamentals are also covered in the required textbook, MLA Handbook, particularly the assigned reading from it.

Response Paper, Seminar, and Essay:
All written work may be submitted electronically in Adobe, Word, WordPerfect, or OpenOffice.  Just make sure your computer is virus-free! (You can get free virus software at http://its.dal.ca/services/computer_services/downloads/ .)

The response papers should briefly address a Romantic-era reading and offer some discussion of its significance for a particular theoretical problem.  You may pick any of the Romantic-era readings on the syllabus from the fourth class to the end of term, but can only submit one response paper per week and cannot write a response paper on the same text as your seminar.

The seminar is a short essay to be read aloud, like a conference paper (that is, a researched argument about the literary material), and can be used to address any course-related topic in connection with one, or more, of the works of literature assigned for the week in which it is presented; arguments may be tentative and questions may be raised as well as answered, but the seminar should be helpful to the class and facilitate class discussion. The seminar must also be submitted in writing to facilitate feedback on writing and documentation as well as the quality of the presented argument and evidence.  Students’ seminars will be scheduled in October and November, and everyone must choose their seminar week by the end of the third class (a sign-up sheet will be circulated in the first three classes).

The final essay should be a well-argued, well-researched, and well-written analysis of reading(s) assigned for the class on terms relevant to our discussions over the term.  As the critical readings for this class demonstrate, I am open, as a matter of principle, to any current theoretical approach to the material.

Grading will follow the department’s guidelines on the evaluation of graduate work (http://english.dal.ca/Programs/Graduate%20Program/General%20Information/Evaluation.php).  I reserve the right not to accept late papers.

Participation Grade:
The participation grade will be based on contributions to class discussion across the term, whether questions, comments, or answers, and the quality of those contributions will be the primary consideration in grading. To contribute, of course, students must also regularly attend class, so attendance will be a significant factor. Quality contributions will generally accomplish one or more of the following: a) demonstrate knowledge and careful consideration of the assigned material (both that week’s readings and previous weeks’ readings); b) offer constructive and professional responses to other students’ presentations and remarks; c) bring into the class discussion relevant material not specifically assigned, from students’ further research on the course subject, for instance. Grades will be calculated on the following scale: number of classes attended divided by number of classes held, multiplied by .7 if the student did not contribute much beyond respectful listening or general questions (e.g., “why did the Romantics write so many sonnets?”); by .85 if the student contributed constructively to most classes, sometimes with high-quality remarks or informed, pointed questions (e.g., “is Wordsworth suggesting in ‘Tintern Abbey’ that women cannot directly experience the sublime?”); by 1.0 if the student contributed in nearly every class, often with high-quality remarks and informed, pointed questions. Students may also be given a multiplier lower than .7 if they disrupt class discussion with unprofessional remarks, interrupt student presentations or class discussion by arriving late, or otherwise interfere with, rather than contribute to, the learning experience of their peers.  Legitimate reasons for missing classes or being late will, of course, be duly considered and the calculation revised accordingly.

Accessibility
Students may request accommodation as a result of barriers related to disability, religious  obligation, or any characteristic under the Nova Scotia Human Rights  Act. Students who require academic accommodation for either classroom participation or the writing of tests, quizzes and exams should make  their request to the Office of Student Accessibility & Accommodation  (OSAA) prior to or at the outset of each academic term (with the  exception of X/Y courses).  Please see www.studentaccessibility.dal.ca  for more information and to obtain Form A  Request for Accommodation.
A note taker may be required to assist a classmate.  There is an  honorarium of $75/course/term.  If you are interested, please contact  OSAA at 494-2836 for more information.
Reading Schedule

Sept. 10th: a) Introduction to Research; b) Some Coordinates of Romantic Theory
Introduction to relevant databases and electronic sources (ECCO, MLA Bibliography, etc.) and research methods; Abrams, Introduction to The Mirror and the Lamp; Lovejoy, “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms.”

Sept. 17th: Sublimity
Pseudo-Longinus, On the Sublime (sections I-X); Burke, excerpt from Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of our Ideas on the Sublime and the Beautiful; Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey,” “The Thorn,” and excerpts from The Prelude (1805) (“Crossing Simplon Pass,” “Spots of Time,” and “Vision on Mount Snowdon”) (all in Norton); chapter 8 from Kirwan, Sublimity (2005).

Sept. 24th: Originality
Plato, Ion; Young, Conjectures on Original Composition; Hazlitt,  Essay V (2nd part of “On Genius and Common Sense”); Coleridge, “To William Wordsworth” and excerpt from Chapter XIII of Biographia Literaria (Norton); Mazzeo, “Coleridge, Plagiarism, and Narrative Mastery.”

October 1st: Sensibility
Adam Smith, excerpt from Theory of Moral Sentiments; Ryves, “Ode to Sensibility”; More, “Sensibility”; Coleridge, “Fears in Solitude”; Barbauld, “Epistle to William Wilberforce” (Norton); McGann, excerpt from Poetics of Sensibility (1998).

October 8th: University Closed

October 15th: Gothic
Radcliffe, “On the Supernatural in Poetry”; Aikins, “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror” (Norton); Rev. of Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer; Hogle, “Frankenstein as Neo-Gothic: From the Ghost of the Counterfeit to the Monster of Abjection.”

October 22nd: Drama
Baillie, “Introductory Discourse to the Plays on the Passions”; Hunt, “Some Account of the Origin and Nature of Masks”; De Quincey, “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth” (Norton); Richardson, from A Mental Theater:  Poetic Consciousness and Drama in the Romantic Age (1988)

October 29th:  Canons
Sidney, “Defense of Poesie”; Warton, “Preface” to History of English Poetry; P. B. Shelley, excerpt from “Defence of Poetry” (Norton); Southey, “Introduction: The Lives and Works of our Uneducated Poets”; Campbell, excerpt from Specimens of the British Poets; Hazlitt, Preface to Select Poets of Great Britain; Curran, “Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales in Context”

November 5th: Victorian Theories of Romanticism
Robert Browning, “Essay on Shelley”; Arnold, “Wordsworth” and “Dover Beach”; Denis Florence MacCarthy’s “A Walk by the Bay of Dublin”; Wilde, “On the Decay of Lying”; Ruwe, “Opium Addictions and Meta-Physicians:  Sara Coleridge’s Editing of Biographia Literaria” 

November 12th: University Closed

November 19th:  The Formalist Turn, or Is It Mythic?
Coleridge, “Kubla Khan” (Norton); Abrams, excerpt from Natural Supernaturalism; Wellek, “The Concept of ‘Romanticism’ in Literary History”; Frye, excerpt from Study of English Romanticism

November 26th: The Historicist Turn, or Is It Allegorical?
Blake, America; Erdman, excerpt from Prophet Against Empire; McGann, The Romantic Ideology; Lee, “Yellow Fever and the Slave Trade:  Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (ELH 65 [1998]: 675-700; available online through library).

December 3rd:  The Demographic Turn, or Is It Determinist?
Lokke, “Gender and Sexuality”; Scrivener, “Class”; Kitson, “Race” (BLS).  The Case of the Mouse:  Barbauld, “The Mouse’s Petition”; Burns, “To a Mouse”; Clare, “Mouse’s Nest” (all in Norton).