ENL 2022: Survey of English Literature II
Spring, 2004
MW
MC 115
Michael Harrawood, Instructor
Office Hours: MW
Required Texts: The Norton Anthology of English Literature,
Seventh Edition, Vol II.
The Writer’s FAQs: a
pocket handbook, by Muriel Harris
Course Description:
This course is intended to familiarize the student with the major
authors and works in English literature from the French Revolution to the
present. In addition to close readings
of many of the rich and intellectually dense texts generated in English during
this very busy and productive period, we will also consider the cultural
context in which these works were generated.
Our goal will be to gain a deeper knowledge of the literary tradition we
inherit, a tradition that both informs and antagonizes our present-day literary
production and literary study. We will
try to isolate a few important themes and follow their development over the
period of intellectual, spiritual, economic, and linguistic growth that founds
our own historical moment. I have
prepared a very fast-paced schedule, but we can give ourselves more time with
the texts and authors we find more interesting.
Themes we’ll consider will include the growth of nationalism, of
national language and identity, the development of “inwardness” and of the
lyrical self, changes in religious ideology and in gender issues, the relation
of literary aesthetics to Empire, among many others. We’ll also be interested in the status of the
writing in an age of growing industrialism and technological change.
How You’ll Get
Your Grade: This is a Gordon Rule course, which means
that each student must generate 6,000 words of writing in order to pass. I have divided the written exercises over a
series of papers (each of which can be revised) and a listserv to which
students will post twice a week. We ask
students to study literature not just to become better readers but also better
talkers, writers and thinkers – and so you will be evaluated in terms of your
progress in all of these areas:
Attendance: Attendance is required.
I’ll take role before each class.
You can have two (2) unexcused absences during the semester. After your third absence, I will file an
automatic F for you for the semester.
If you have a real problem attending the class, come see me and we’ll
try to work something out.
Participation: I
will expect you to show up for class having read and re-read the day’s reading
assignment, and I will grade you for the frequency and quality of your class
contributions. Please take this
requirement seriously and do not try to bluff your way through the course.
Always be ready to use the text as the source for your comments.
Internet: I have asked the
FAU webmaster to create a listserv, named Britlit-L, for this class. On the first day of class I’ll ask students
to submit an email address which I will then use to subscribe the student to
the list. After the first week, each
student in the class will post twice a week to the list. The first post has to go up before
Papers: Students will write
four (4) papers of five pages each.
These papers will be rehearsed over the listserv and will be on topics
we generate together, either in conference or in class. The papers must indicate a rigorous and sustained engagement with the readings and with the issues they
raise. They must be correctly spelled
and punctuated – I will hand back any papers with spelling or grammatical
errors.
A Note on Plagiarism: “Plagiarism” means representing someone
else’s writing as your own – whether that writing is stolen outright, copied
off another paper, purchased, or downloaded from the web. Student cheating on written work has become
more and more prominent an issue in higher education, especially in the last
decade of web sites featuring downloadable papers. FAU presently subscribes to several services
that track web sources for student papers in order to discover plagiarism in
student writing. The
A Note on Monarch Notes and Cliff’s Notes: Two words on these: Come On!
Do you really think that what some grad student getting six dollars an
hour wrote 20 years ago is going to tell you anything cool about The Marriage of Heaven and Hell or The Lyrical Ballads? No way!
My advice is to skip ‘em. Blake
and Wordsworth are better writers than the guys who wrote the ponies, and so
probably are you.
But if you
choose to pony up for the course, remember that I’ve read them too and that
they contain lots and lots of basic errors.
Read them at your own risk.
Exams, tests, pop quizzes: At present, I am not planning any exams
or tests for the course, since it requires so much writing. But this can change. The reason instructors give these is that we
must be certain that everybody in the class is doing the reading and we must
have a way of evaluating your efforts.
If everybody does the reading and comes into class ready to hit, fine;
if I get a sense that students in the class are blowing off reading
assignments, if everybody in the class is
not posting regularly to the listserv, then I may give a pop quiz, just to
liven things up.
Schedule:
(Please note that the following is provisional and depends upon our
progress through the class material. The
schedule is not a contract and we can change it as we go. I recommend that you look ahead through the Norton Anthology and see what is in
there that you would like us to read together in class.)
Week One: January 7: Introduction
Week Two: January 12, 14:
English Responses to the Revolution in
Week Three: Monday, January 19 is Martin Luther King day: No Class; Wednesday, January 21: Mary Wollstoncraft, “A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman.”
Week Four: January 26, 28:
Wordsworth and Coleridge. “The Prelude,” “The Rime
of the Ancient Mariner.” Selected poems and the
Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.
Week Five: February 2, 4:
Shelley and Keats.
“Mount Blanc,” “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,”
“To a Skylark”; “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” Endymion,” Ode to a
Nightengale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Letters: Negative Capability.
Five-page
paper due in my mailbox by
Week Six: February 9, 11: The Novel. Mary
Shelley, Frankenstein.
Week Seven and Week Eight:
February 16, 18: The Victorian Novel. These weeks will be consecrate to reading and
discussing a 19th century novel that will be selected by the class.
Five-page
paper due in my mailbox by
Week Nine: February
23, 27: Victorian Essays on Poetics and
Civil Life: Thomas
Carlyle, Portraits,
“Sartor Resartus,” “Past and Present”;
John Stuart Mill, “What is Poetry?” “On
Week Ten: March 1, 3: “Victorian Issues,” selections from the Norton, pp, 1679-1740. Charles Darwin, “The Origin of Species,” “The Descent of Man”; Sir
Edmund Gosse, “Father and Son”; Frierich Engels, “The Great Towns,” “The
Communist Manifesto,” (with Karl Marx, handout); Kingsley and Dickens
selections.
March 8-13. Spring Break. Everybody tries to stay safe, out of jail and
off of MTV.
Week Eleven: March 15, 17: “The Rise and Fall
of Empire,” Norton, pp. 2017-2035;
Kipling, “The Man Who Would Be King.”
Week Twelve: March 22, 24: Heart
of Darkness. For Wednesday read also Chinua Achebe,
“Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,”
Norton, pp. 2035-2041.
Five-page
paper due in my mailbox by
Week Thirteen: March 29, 31:
Virginia Woolf, “A Room
of One’s Own,” “Professions for Women”; James Joyce, “Araby,” “The Dead;” T.S.
Elliot, “The Waste Land.”
Week Fourteen, April 5, 7: George Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant,” “Politics and the English
Language”; W.H. Auden, “Petition,” “On This
Week Fifteen, April 12, 15 : Salman
Rushdie, “The Prophet’s Hair,” “The Courter” (handout).
Week 15 ½: Class meets on April 19, the Monday before
Reading Day.
Five-page
paper due in my box by