ENGLISH 222 (Spring 2005)

Survey of English Literature II

Monday, 6:05 – 8:55 PM

Professor Mark Lussier

I. Important Information: since this class only meets once per week, it is crucial that you maintain contact and commit, so here is the information you need to maintain that contact/commitment. [NOTE: I receive a large amount of e-mail everyday, so don’t expect instant responses. I will move with whatever dispatch I can muster. If you send e-mail from an address other that ASU, your message might arrive in my ‘quarantined files’ and thereby take longer to retrieve.]

Office Location = LL547C

Office Phone = 480.965.3925

E-Mail = mark.lussier@asu.edu

Office Hours: M = 11-1, 4-6/W = 11-1/Other = By Appointment

II. Textbooks: I have assigned only one book, although t’is massive.

Abrams et al. Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7 th Edition, Volume 2

III. Course Description & Requirements

The goal for this course is to provide a solid foundation in English literary history, from the late-Eighteenth Century (e.g. the Romantic period) and proceeding into the early-Twentieth Century (e.g. the Modern period). Given the large number of writers and the limited number of weeks, the course will emphasize major writers and broad cultural movements, and the tripartite organization for the course acknowledges the impossibility of covering all material in summative fashion. The course will also move generically from poetry and toward prose fiction (although this trajectory is not absolute). The syllabus for this course is mounted on my webpage (see address above), and I will periodically direct you to it for supplemental reasons (e.g. hand-outs etc.).

The reading pace will be brisk yet fair, and the course emphasizes the accumulation of knowledge, rather than the ability to conduct independent research and produce a paper based on that research. The generation of your grade will reflect this orientation: the requirements for the course include a midterm and final examination, four short quizzes, and two papers. Attendance is required, although I will probably not take roll every class period, and excessive absences (three without contact and without supporting documentation) will result in scaled grade deductions. I expect you to arrive with your reading and any assigned work completed, and I will not accept any late work without supporting documentation and prior contact. You must complete all writing assignments, as well as the midterm and final, to earn a grade in the course.

Your final grade will be calculated in the following manner:

Midterm 20%
Final 20%
Quizzes 20%
Paper 1 10%
Paper 2 20%
Participation 10%
Total 100%

IV. Reading Schedule

01/24 Course Introduction

Discussion of Requirements

Introduction to Romanticism

Outer/Inner Revolutions

01/31 The Romantic Period (1)

William Blake (35-8), Songs of Innocence and Of Experience (43) and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (72-83)

02/07 Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion (64-71)

Mary Wollstonecraft (163-6), “Vindication (166-91)

Dorothy Wordsworth (383-400)

William Wordsworth (219-22), “Tintern Abbey” (235)

02/14 Wordsworth, “Preface” (238-51), “I wandered lonely . . .” (284), “Expostulation and Reply,” “The Tables Turned” (227-9), “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (286-92); Samuel Taylor Coleridge (416-9), “The Eolian Harp” and “Dejection: An Ode” (419, 459), “The Nightingale” (copy)

02/21 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (474-84), “Kubla Khan” (439)

“The Satanic Hero” (491); Lord Byron (551-4), “She walks in beauty” (556), “Prometheus” (copy), “Sin’s Long Labyrinth” (564-5), Manfred (588-620) [paper one due]

02/28 Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (698-01, 903-5), “To Wordsworth” (701), “Mont Blanc” and “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” (720, 723), “Adonais” (772); John Keats (823-6), “La Belle Dame” (845), “Ode to a Nightingale” (849), “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (851), “To Autumn” (872), Selected Letters (886-902)

Victorian Culture/s & Crises

03/07 “The Victorian Age” (1043)

Thomas Carlyle (1066), “Portraits” (1070-6), Sartor Resartus (1077-1102); John Henry Cardinal Newman (1119), “The Idea of the University” (1121-8) John Stuart Mill (1137), “Autobiography” (1166-72); Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1173), “The Cry of the Children” (1174)

[midsemester examination]

03/14 Spring Break

03/21 Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1198), “The Lady of Shalott” (1204), “Ulysses” and “Tithonus” (1213-6), In Memoriam, O-15 (1231-40), 54-59 (1250-3), 118-E (1274-80); Robert Browning (1345), “Porphyria’s Lover” and “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” (1349-51)

03/28 Matthew Arnold (1471), “Isolation: To Marguerite,” “To Marguerite—Continued,” “ Dover Beach,” “Stanzas . . . Chartreuse” (1478-80, 1492-8), and “Literature and Science” (1545); Thomas Henry Huxley (1558), “Science and Culture” (1559); Charles Darwin (1679-90); Leonard Huxley (1690-3)

04/04 Christina Rossetti “Goblin Market” (1589); Friedrich Engels, “The Great Towns” (1702); Annie Besant, “The ‘White Slavery’ pf London Match Workers” (1715); Sarah Stickney Ellis, “The Women of England” (1721), Coventry Patmore, “The Angel in the House” and “The Paragon” (1723), Anonymous, “The Great Social Evil” (1728); Walter Besant, “The Queen’s Reign”(1738)

04/11 Oscar Wilde (1747), “The Critic as Artist” and “Preface” (1752-61) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1761)

Darkness Within and Without

04/18 The Twentieth Century (1897)

Rudyard Kipling, “The Man Who Would Be King” (1865); Joseph Conrad (1952), Heart of Darkness (1957); Virginia Woolf (2141), “Modern Fiction” (2148)

04/25 William Butler Yeats (2085), “The Sorrow of Love,” “When You Are Old,” “Easter 1916,” “The Second Coming” and “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” (2093, 2104, 2106, 2120); James Joyce (2231), “The Dead” (2240); T. S. Eliot (2360), The Wasteland (2368)

05/02 Stevie Smith (2450), “The New Age” (2453); W. H. Auden (2500), “Their Lonely Betters” (2508); Dylan Thomas (2516), “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” (2524)

[final examination]

V. Paper Number One

Read the “The French Revolution and the ‘Spirit of the Age’” (117-63, and apply the information, facts, and insights gathered within this work to read any of the passages on the French Revolution located in William Wordsworth’s Prelude (354-363). Feel free to draw upon introductions, class notes, and discussions to supplement the material found in the assigned reading. The scale for the paper should be 4-5 pages (1,000-1,500 words). The paper is due on February 21 st.


 
  Last updated: January 30, 2005