Aspects of Literary History: Spring and Summer Terms 2008 Essay

Welcome to the Aspects of literary tale ply. This is an ambitious blood with a number of separate tho interwoven strands1) The style allow for introduce you to some of the key concepts of literary account statement.2) The form allow foring enact literary history by examining the history of a particular counseling of life of writing from its Hellenic origins through the seventeenth, ordinal, nineteenth, cardinal and twenty-first centuries. You entrust be asked to think in barriers of unique(predicate) literary historical periods.3) The business resulting make you to a greater extent long-familiar with the study and interpreting of numbers, with particular attention to improving your skills in remnant admiting.4) The blood line will examine plain poetry from its origins in the Greek Idylls, its dissemination through Roman models and its diversification into many forms the plaint, the country signboard poem, the love lyric, the poem of reflection, the phil osophic poem, the nature poem and the raillery.5) The tend will focalize historically on the arcadian not simply because it provides the originating mode for these diverse forms still because it is the product of a specific political and soci able culture an elite form produced originally in a knuckle down culture (Greek) and disseminated through another slave culture (Roman). This will smash you the basis for thinking about(predicate) the historical contextualization of the rustic as a form.6) How control later English poets from the seventeenth nose candy onwards make use of the political and social entailments of the pastoral form? How have they expand it by the introduction of a Christian content? How have Ameri drop poets made use of the form in result to the colonization of the new-fangledistic World, a process seen by many (at the time and subsequently) through the meaning of the pastoral?7) The analysis of pastoral will enable you to undertake the approxima tely subtle intrinsic literary historical analysis, the nigh ambitious and the most ranging extrinsic literary historical analysis and the most effective faction of intrinsic and extrinsic modes.The Aspects of literary History run will be taught by berate and seminar in the spring limit and the summer term. You will use the Aspects of Literary History course endorser for preparation and for seminar news. The poems for discussion in the speechs and in the seminars atomic number 18 all printed in the course removeer and the course supplement. The stirs for the course will be held in Chichester Lecture field of study on Mondays 12-1. The seminars for the course will take place later in the calendar week. transport check the timetable for your individual give lessons and for the time of your seminar.There ar four secondary texts we would also like you to read during this course capital of Minnesota Alpers What Is Pastoral?, Raymond Williams The nation and the City, Jona than Bates The Song of the Earth and Chris fitters Poetry, Space, Landscape. There ar multiple copies of these in unmindful give and you should be able to read these during the vacation and during the spring and summer terms. You john borrow short loan books over the vacation and renew on-line. of the essence(p) secondary material is available in the Reserve Collection or in the Artsfac part of the Reserve Collection. Ask at the Reserve Collection fore communicate this material is stored under the name of the course convenor, Alistair Davies.The seminar strand will supporting the lecture series by ensuring that you have grasped the literary historical subject area of the week (definitions and information are go under out in the referee). still it will function principally a) to improve your confidence and skill in reading poetry and b) to encourage you if you wish to look your own creative response in poetry to the themes and topics of the course. We go for that you will become more than proficient, more imaginative and more self-assured readers of poetry.Your relieve course work will be 2 1000 discourse course work leavens 20% each. We are hoping to encourage you to be concise, focused and lucid in your writing. You will have the opportunity, if you wish, to submit genius piece of creative writing out of two pieces of written work for the course. Remember to check your written work against the criteria exercise set out in the Feedback and How to Make Use of It document you were tending(p) come through term.To underline the importance we attach to your creativity, we draw your attention to details of the Stanmer calculate on page 4 of the course reader. You can read the poems produced by previous winners on the English web-site.The course will also be examined by an unseen in the summer term 60%. You will be required to comment closely on three poems or passages of poems in slipway that reflect upon the literary historical topics covered in the course. You can consult past examination papers through the Sussex web-site.You will commence below a detailed plan of the course. You will be able to see how lectures cram you for seminars in each week and you will be able to plan your work for the course from the goning to the end of the course. We hope that you will find this course informative and enjoyable. If you have any queries, do not hesitate to contact your course tutor or the course convenor, Dr Alistair Davies H.A.Daviessussex.ac.ukThe course will be taught in the following articulate the order in which it is set out in the course readerhebdomad 1Genre and conventionsThe first lecture by Professor Norman Vance will focus on Miltons Lycidas and Paradise Lost and will look for Miltons use of classical genre(s) and conventions. Prepare for the lecture by reading the Genre and Conventions, The Origins of the Pastoral and the Pastoral Elegy portions of the course reader and the section of the Aspects Course S upplement.Week 1 Norman Vance Pastoral Genre and Convention Miltons Lycidas and Paradise LostIn your first seminar, you will focus on two poems Herricks To Daffodils (p.33) and Elizabeth Bishops North Haven (p.5). What are the generic constituents of Herricks poem? What makes Bishops poem a) a pastoral elegy and b) how does it differ as a modern pastoral elegy from Miltons Renaissance pastoral elegy? Paul Alpers study of pastoral cited in the course reader will be helpful here. You whitethorn wish to read Alpers discussion of Lycidas in What is Pastoral there are copies of this in reserve and in short loan copies too in Artsfac. We begin with pastoral and we will focus on pastoral but one presupposition we will explore in the course is that the pastoral idyll provides the ground substance out of which the elegy, the love poem, the poem of philosophical reflection, the subjective lyric, the love poem, the satire and the nature poem are developed in spite of appearance the western and within the English customs.Week 2 Intertextuality.The second lecture will be addicted by Professor Andrew Hadfield and will focus on Jonsons To Penshurst. Prepare for the lecture by re-reading Virgils first eclogue and Horaces second epode in the course reader. You will find To Penshurst in the course reader (pp.29-31). Read the Intertextuality section of the course reader, pp.26-32.Week 2 Andrew Hadfield Intertextuality Ben Jonsons To Penshurst and the Country- hearthstone PoemFor your seminar, read Yeats Coole Park, 1929 and Walcotts Ruins of a Great House in the course reader (pp.31-32). How does Yeats relate to Jonson how does Walcott relate to Yeats (who was an important early influence)? What does it tell us about history and about the history of literature that a poet of the English renaissance, an Irish poet of the 1920s and a Caribbean poet of post-war period should use a form established by Roman poets in the first blow BC. What are the links between pastoral, the c ountry-house poem and empire?Week 3/ Literature and Social ChangeThe third lecture of the term will be given by Dr Sophie doubting doubting Thomas on the topic of the eighteenth century prospect poem.Week 3 Dr Sophie Thomas governing, Poetics and LandscapeFor this lecture, Sophie Thomas will explore the changing modes of the prospect poem in industrial plant by Pope, hoary, Cowper and smith printed in the course reader (pp.36-45) and Wordsworths Tintern Abbey printed on pages 47-48. disport read the section Literature and Social Change, pp.33-48 of the course reader.In her lecture, Sophie Thomas will explore the so-called prospect poem, raising questions about the class and the gender position of the viewer and about the different ways in which nature is re-presented. Will you please read carefully Grays Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College.In your seminar, your tutor will either focus on one or more of the poems by Gray, Cowper and Smith in the reader. How important is i t to take into account the gender of the poets discussed? Does a female keepr have a different sense impression of the possession of a adorn to a male writer?Week 4 Literature and Social ChangeThe fourth lecture of the term will be given by Dr Sophie Thomas. Please prepare by reading the poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge in the course reader, pp. 45-48.Week 4 Dr Sophie Thomas The Landscape of the Imagination Wordsworth and ColeridgeIn your seminar, you will read Wordsworths Tintern Abbey (p.47). How does the tradition of the pastoral poem enable the poet to write here a poem of psychology, a poem of philosophical reflection and a poem of race remember it is addressed to the poets sister. Even though it is written for us in heightened diction, this was written as an example of a form Coleridge and Wordsworth admired, the so-called conversational poem. Of course, The prelim is one, very long conversational poem.Week 5 Research fragmentWeek 5 will be a research sin for your semi nar (this will allow you to catch up with your reading and your writing). You will write your first assignment.Your first written assignment will be collectible in week 6 check on Sussex Direct one 1000 word essay 1) a reading of either a) Jonson b) Bishop c) Yeats or d) Walcott in the well-fixed of questions of genre, convention and intertextuality or 2) a reading of the prospect poem, with reference to Gray, Cowper, Smith or Wordsworth) or, if you wish, 3) you may write an account of George Herberts Life and Andrew Marvells The Garden in the supplement in relationship to ideas of melancholy and of loss, pp. 6-7. The poetry of the English renaissance provides the models from which the English poets of the Romantic period develop the religious, philosophical and psychological preoccupations of their verse.Your seminar tutor will set you specific titles for this assignment.Week 6 Literary History and Periodisation (pp.37-40)The fifth lecture will be given by Dr Alistair Davies on Goldsmiths The desert Village pp.53-58 of course reader). Please read this poem closely before the lecture.Week 6 Dr Alistair Davies Goldsmiths The Deserted Village Literary History and Periodisation.To prepare for the topic for week 6, read the section on Literary History and Periodisation (pp. 49-58) in the course-reader and the section on Literary History and Periodisation in the course supplement.The lecture will set the poem in the context of the gimmick of an eighteenth century landscaped estate and house. The University of Sussex is built in the eighteenth-century country-park of Stanmer House. Please take a stroll around this park (or its remnants) and have a look at the Palladian-style Stanmer House (see final page of course reader).In your seminar, you will discuss the Virgilian and Horatian intertexts of The Deserted Village, relate the poem to questions of globalisation and migration, and explore the links between Goldsmiths poem and the English landscape and pictoria l tradition of the eighteenth century represented by Gainsboroughs painting in the course reader and on its back cover.Please also read the account of Michael McKeons article The Pastoral variation cited in the course reader. There is a brief prcis in the course reader but you should make every effort to read the whole of this important article in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N.Zwicker (eds) Refiguring Revolutions.You would also benefit, if you have not yet done so, from reading the recommended chapters in Raymond Williamss indispensable The Country and the City there are many copies of this in reserve and in short loan and Jonathan Bates The Song of the Earth.Week 7. Literary History Politics and the Subject of ModernityThe sixth lecture of the course will be given by Dr Alistair Davies on The advance.Week 7 Dr Alistair Davies Wordsworths The Prelude Politics and the Subject of ModernityFor your preparation, please re-read The 1805 Prelude, with particular reference to Books 1, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13. For the seminar, we hope you to read A.R.Ammonss Corsons Inlet (pp. 77-8). In what ways can you read Ammonss poem as a post-Romantic rejoinder to Tintern Abbey? In what way is twentieth century American poetry, as we find it instanced in Ammons poem, a critique of the English Romantic tradition and of the American nineteenth century transcendental tradition it helped to shape? Remember that Wordsworth is a cardinal forerunner figure for the modern American lyric poet as he is for the modern English lyric poet. Remember too that the pastoral is a fundamental form in American self-identification in the founding and settling of the new-sprung(prenominal) World. Sylvia Plaths has written wonderful and little known sonnet mayflower on this topic, which you will find on page 49 of the course reader.Week 8. Feminist Literary History.The seventh lecture will be given by Dr Jenny Taylor on Christina Rossetti, concentrating on gremlin mart, pp. 66-71 of the course reader. Please prepare for the lecture by reading Goblin Market and the section on Feminist Literary History in the Aspects course reader, pp.63-71.Week 8 Dr Jenny Taylor Christina Rossetti and the Question of Feminist Literary HistoryFor your seminar, we want you to work through the three poems by Rossetti in the course reader in the light of the questions raised by the lecture and to compare them to the contemporaneous poems by Emily Dickinson in the Atlantic Studies and American pastoral section of the course reader, pp. 96.Second assignment for delivery in week 2 of the summer term. see Sussex Direct. What we want you to do for your second essay is to explore the idea of loco-descriptive verse and the walking or ambulatory poem, examining the ways in which Wordsworth and Ammons have used these forms for metaphysical and religious explorations.You may write a walking poem for your final submission (no more than 30 lines) but with an auto-critique or justification amounting in total to 7 50 wrangle. Or you may write a sonnet in the same on the building a) of Stanmer House in the 1700s or b) the University of Sussex in the 1960s to explore a piece of profound historical transition. It would be useful to re-read Goldsmiths The Deserted Village and the material on Enclosure and Emparking in the course reader before you embark on this (pp.53-58). You might take Sylvia Plaths trailing arbutus on page 49 as your model.Otherwise, you may write a comparative analysis of Wordworths Tintern Abbey and of the Ammons poem. Or your tutor may set you an exercise which has arisen from discussions in your final seminar on Hardy. This exercise is 1000 words long.Week 9. Literary History Transmission and scatteringThe eighth lecture will be given by Professor Norman Vance on pastoral and the loss of faith reflected in and through attitudes to nature in Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, focusing on the poems by Wordsworth, Shelley and Hardy in the course reader, pp.72-77. Please re ad the section on Literary History and Dissemination in the course reader, pp.47-51.Week 9 Prof Norman Vance The surrender of Nature from Wordsworth to Hardy.For your seminar, you will read the series of poems about birds and bird-song in the course supplement, as well as poems by Hardy and Yeats in the course reader linking the poets concerns with bird song and with flight to the possibility or impossibility of preserving the poetic tradition. How do scientific ideas particularly those of Darwin affect nineteenth century poetry? You will also consider the links between literary and intellectual history.Q. What do you think are the relationships between the Samuel Palmer Pastoral Scene (1835) on the social movement cover of the course reader and nineteenth century preoccupations with secularisation?The Jo Francis essay cited in the course reader is useful for reading Mont Blanc the Picot essay (like Franciss essay in Artsfac in the Reserve Collection) is also very helpful. pass Term 2008We expect you to undertake some preparation for the summer term by reading the Atlantic Studies and American Pastoral section of the course reader and the Atlantic Studies and American Pastoral section of the course supplement.The lecture titles for the summer term are as follows. You will be given details about the work to be undertaken during the vacation and in your term-time seminars at the end of the spring term.