Eng 222 Syllabus

Course Rationale:

222 surveys British literature from the early 19th century through the late 20th century. While we cannot possibly do an exhaustive job of treating the three major literary genres (we do some justice to the novel and poetry but very little to drama), we will be discussing at least some representative works from each of the major movements and periods. Because this is a survey course, it makes no pretense to thematic unity. Rather, some lectures will touch on the broad spectrum of literary, historical, and intellectual issues out of which this literature emerged; others will zoom in on the literary works under discussion for the week.



Requirements:

There are four major requirements comprising 90% of your grade: a midterm essay exam (25%), two 5-7 page critical essays (20% each), and a final essay exam (25%) [For sample exams from previous semesters, follow the links below]. The due dates for these are marked in the syllabus below. Topics for the critical papers will be distributed in class (and made available on this website) 2 weeks before the paper is due. In addition to these, 10% of your final grade will come from your participation during class discussions and from your grades on the quizzes, which will be given usually on the first day of discussion of the novels. Attendance at all lectures and active participation in class discussions are absolutely essential to success in this course. Please take comprehensive notes on your reading and have all reading assignments completed by the day on which they are due to be discussed. Online links to exams and paper topics from this page will be password protected. The ID and password to allow you access to these will be announced in class.

One of the purposes of this online syllabus is to point you toward websites which provide additional information about writers, about writing essays, and about literary theory. You may also email any of your instructors with questions about paper topics and tests. If you have questions about getting started on a paper, you can help us help you by providing us with a thesis paragraph and asking us to respond to it. General grading guidelines for the critical papers can be found here.

N.B. We expect that your papers will conform to ASU guidelines on academic honesty. That is, we expect that all work is your own except for that which you have explicitly cited on your "Works Cited" page. This means you must cite ideas and words borrowed from online sources as well as from books and articles found in the library. If you have further questions about this policy, see the statement issued by the Women's Studies Program here. It provides a succinct summary of the policy in effect in this class.

If you are interested in a readable introduction to basic theoretical issues, start by taking a look at John Lye's Literary Theory: An Introduction and the Glossary of Literary Theory. For links to sites that offer help with rhetorical terms or with mythological background, see Starting Point for Literary Research. Essays written for this class should conform to the conventions set out in the MLA Format and Citation Guide. You may find it useful to consult a writing handbook. The following three are currently available on the Web: Elements of Style, Online English Grammar, and Able Writer: A Rhetoric and Handbook. You should also make use of a dictionary such as the WWWebster Dictionary.

You should be familiar with the website for ASU's Hayden Library. For useful general sources of information about literary topics consult the following: Literary Resources Page, Encyclopedia Britannica (ASU only), and Voice of the Shuttle. For online literary texts try these sites: Modern English Collection, The Online Books Page, and Literature Online (Chadwyck-Healey; ASU only). The latter database is also useful for keyword, phrase, and line searches of British and American poetry, British drama, and some fiction (the online fiction collection of this database is presently rather small). You may also find the British History Timeline a useful source of historical information as well as the Encyclopedia of British History, 1700-1930 [New!]. While there is not much online literary criticism currently available, you may find the IPL Online Literary Criticism site, Literary Criticism on the Web, and Project MUSE useful (the latter has full-text articles from such important literary journals as New Literary History, ELH, and Modern Fiction Studies).


Books (Required Reading):

Damrosch et al., The Longman Anthology of British Literature. Vol. 2. (Longman).

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. (NAL).

Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. (Norton).

Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. (Oxford).

Forster, E. M. Passage to India. (HBJ).

These books are now available at the ASU Bookstore.

Required readings in the schedule below come from the 5 books ordered for the course. Page numbers refer to pages in The Longman Anthology of British Literature, Vol. 2. The links in brackets will take you to websites that provide further information on specific topics. For a list of paper topics for the first critical paper, go here. For a list of paper topics for the second critical paper, go here.
The Romantic Period


Wordsworth and Coleridge

W, 1/20: Introduction: Romantic Period overview

F, 1/22: Preface to Lyrical Ballads (332-6);"Ode. Intimations of Immortality from the Recollections of Early Childhood" (434),"We Are Seven," (317); "Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey" (328); "Resolution and Independence" (430-2)

{Romantic Resources on the Web; John Locke
Michael Gamer's List of Romantic Links
William Wordsworth, Wordsworth Images
Romantic Chronology, The Romantic Period, 1785-1830
Preface to Lyrical Ballads}

M, 1/25 Romantics and the Problem of Origins: Inventing Childhood (Wordsworth)

W, 1/27: Romantics and the Problem of Origins: Self as Source (Coleridge): "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (484-498); "Dejection: An Ode" (519); Kubla Khan" (501)

{Coleridge's Biographia Literaria. Vol. I
David Hume; Kant's Prolegomena; A Coleridge Companion}

F, 1/29: Wordsworth and Coleridge discussion continued

M, 2/1: Natural Supernaturalism and the Familial Ideology: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus

W, 2/3: Hating What You Make: Frankenstein continued

F, 2/5: continued

{Resources for the Study of Frankenstein; Byron's Manfred; P.B. Shelley's Prometheus Unbound; John Milton,Paradise Lost (ASU only); A Review of Frankenstein by Sir Walter Scott}

M, 2/8: Romantic Agony and Romantic Melancholy

{Prometheus Library}

W, 2/10: The Pleasures of Pain: John Keats

"Ode on Melancholy" (778), "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (775), "Ode to a Nightingale" (773)

{Edmund Burke, "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful" (excerpts); Aristotle,Poetics}

F, 2/12: Keats, cont. **First critical paper due.** Grading guidelines for the critical papers. Topics

The Victorian Period

M, 2/15: Evangelical Reform and the Evolution of "Victorian" Manners

{Landow on Religion, Landow and "The Doctrines of Evangelical Protestantism"; Browse Landow's Victorian Web}

W, 2/17: The Victorian Bildungsroman and the Liberal Subject: Bronte's Jane Eyre

{"The Bildungsroman Genre: Great Expectations, Aurora Leigh, and Waterland," Suzanne Hader); Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre(Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Bronte); Liberalism and Cultural Shock in the Victorian Age; John Stuart Mill, On Liberty; Jane Eyre and A Vindication of the Rights of Women;}

F, 2/19: Jane Eyre continued

{The Gothic, From the "Dictionary of Sensibility" see: sympathy,The Sublime, fear/terror/horror, compassion/pity,character}

M, 2/22: "Ceaseless excitation and ruthless restraint": The Erotics of Restraint in Jane Eyre

W, 2/24: Jane Eyre continued

F, 2/26: Jane Eyre continue

M, 3/1: **Midterm Exam**

W, 3/3: Natural and Unnatural Selection

Darwin (1283-1312); Gosse (1340-4); Alfred Lord Tennyson, "In Memoriam" (1214);Thomas Hardy's "Hap" (2081); Hardy's "The Impercipient," "The Darkling Thrush" (2083); "Nature's Questioning," "Self-Unconscious"

{The Darwinian Homepage
Evolution
The Tennyson Page
Tennyson and Victorianism
Thomas Hardy
The Thomas Hardy WebSite}

F, 3/5: Tennyson continued

M, 3/8: Tennyson continued

W, 3/10: Hardy

F, 3/12: Hardy/Tennyson continued

M, 3/15-F, 3/19: Spring Recess

Victorian Women and Men

M, 3/22: The Explanatory Power of "Gender": the Victorian "Woman Question"

Wollstonecraft (206-33), Stickney Ellis (1606),Coventry Patmore, Martineau (1618), Caroline Norton (1613); Newman (1612), Hughes (1616) Christina Rossetti, "Goblin Market" (1712)

{A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Full Text); Victorian Women Writers Project; Victorian Women's History; Victorian Gender and Sexuality; John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women}

W, 3/24: Gender continued

{Caroline Norton, English Laws for Women [1854]}

F, 3/26: "Goblin Market" continued

{Josephine Butler, "Social Purity" [1879]; The Emancipation of Women: 1860 to 1920}

M, 3/29: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Aestheticism and the Decadents

Algernon Charles Swinburne, "Hymn to Proserpine" (1752), "The Triumph of Time" (1750), "The Garden of Proserpine" (1517), "Ave Atque Vale" (1519)

{Epicurus;Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"; The Baudrillard Project; Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto"; Victor Margolin, "The Politics of the Artificial"}

W, 3/31: Walter Horatio Pater, "The Child in the House" (1765), "Conclusion" to The Renaissance (1763)

Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray

{The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde; Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience; Oscariana,The Wild Wilde Web;Sex, Scandal and the Novel; Wilde As Sage}

F, 4/2: Aestheticism and Decadence continued

M, 4/5: **Second Critical Paper due** Topics

Paideia and Pederasty: Dorian Gray continued

{Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus; The 1885 Criminal Law Amendment; Rictor Norton's Essays on Gay History and Literature; John Addington Symonds, "A Problem in Greek Ethics"; Michel Foucault Links}

W, 4/7: Dorian Gray continued

F, 4/9: Dorian Gray continued

The Modern Period

M, 4/12: Modernism and Culture (Modernity)

William Butler Yeats, "Easter, 1916" (2310); "The Second Coming" (2312); "Sailing to Byzantium" (2315); "Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop,"(2326); "Under Ben Bulben" (2329)

T.S. Eliot: "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (2447) and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (2420)

{An Index of Sites on Modernism}

W, 4/14: continued

F, 4/16: continued

M, 4/19: Imperialism, Racial Ideology, British Nationalism

Rudyard Kipling, "Danny Deever," "The Widow at Windsor" (1810), "Recessional" (1811), "The White Man's Burden"; "Without Benefit of Clergy" (1790)

Forster, Passage to India

{Never the Twain? Indo-British Relations; Virginia Woolf on E. M. Forster}

W, 4/21: continued

F, 4/23: continued

M, 4/26: Imperialism and the Problem of Language: Passage to India

{Dr. Godbole's India: The Notion of Time in India: An Introduction; The Relation Between Sanskrit and Indian Conceptions of Time; Dr. Aziz's India: Mourning Past Glories, Colonialism, and Indian Fiction; Conceptions of Time and Classical Indian Historiography}

W, 4/28: continued

F, 4/30: continued

M, 5/3: End of Empire: Churchill (2679), Bowen (2690), Orwell (2701), Rushdie (2717, 2726)

W, 5/5: continued

M, 5/10, 7:40-9:30: **Final Exam** Here is a sample final exam.

N.B. Please bring a bluebook or two to the exam.

Victorian Animated GIFs