English
Junior Seminar

English 301
Junior Seminar in English Literary History
Lyric, Epic, Künstlerroman

Robert S. Knapp
ETC 205, T/Th 1:10-2:30
Office hours (Eliot 406): MW 10:40-12:00 and by appointment
Fall, 2006

Description:

This course, a study of the methods and a sample of the materials of English literary history, begins with a token effort to define literary history, then attempts a condensed study of change and continuity in the English sonnet. The course will really focus, however, on Wordsworth's The Prelude, its ancestry, its heirs, and its place in English literary history and English literary education. Prerequisites: junior standing and two English courses at the 200 level or above.

Texts:

Chris Baldick, Criticism and Literary Theory 1890 to the Present (Longman) [on reserve]

James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin)

John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed Hughes and Kastan (Hackett)

Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (Penguin)

James Thomson, The Seasons (Kessinger)

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Harcourt)

William Wordsworth, The Prelude (Penguin)

(recommended) Joseph Gibaldi, MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 6^th ed. (MLA)

Requirements:

1. Regular attendance and informed participation in discussion.
   
   
2. One 5-6 pp. essay on The Prelude
   
   
3. One take-home timed essay on either The Faerie Queene or Paradise Lost
   
   
4. Two library assignments (both connected to the annotated bibliography and critical essay--see below).
   
   
5. An annotated bibliography and a brief (10-15 pp.) critical history of approaches to a particular literary text written originally in English. The statement of topic will be due Sept 14^th; the list of 50 articles or chapters from books (from which 30 will be chosen for your final annotated bibliography) is due Oct. 27^th; the rough draft of the critical history is due November 29^th; the final draft of the entire project is due Dec 11^th. You cannot pass the course without doing satisfactory work on the bibliography and critical history; it is the central project of the course.
   
   Working up the annotated bibliography and writing the critical history will familiarize you with approaches to a particular literary text and will introduce you to the joys and sorrows of analyzing and explaining that history. In the process you will learn more about the library and the scholarly materials associated with the study of English.
   
   Since the central task of the assignment requires managing a large body of references, each student should obtain and learn to use some bibliographic database. For Mac users, I strongly recommend Bookends, available from Sonny Software. Reed has a site license for this program (obtain the license number from me), so there's no charge for using it. Others may wish to use the less powerful Endnote, for which we also have a license (usable only on campus, I believe). PC users may use Endnote or Reference Manager.
   
   Works for the annotated bibliography can be drawn from among literary texts (poems, plays, or fiction) that have at least a fifty-year critical history (so the cut-off year for publication is 1956). Shorter novels (such as Oronokoo, Pride and Prejudice, Hard Times, Mrs. Dalloway, etc.) or much-studied lyric poems (by such poets as Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Pope, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Browning, Yeats, Stevens . . .), or significant plays (such as Tamburlaine, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, The Man of Mode, She Stoops to Conquer, Major Barbara, Mourning Becomes Electra . . .) would be appropriate. Avoid obscure works by famous authors, or works by recently "re-discovered" authors: such texts won't give you the historical spread of criticism you need for this assignment. As you think about which work to choose, remember that it needs to be of manageable length so you can read it quickly and immerse yourself in its critical issues expeditiously. It also needs to be a work you can happily live with at close range for the semester. If you dislike the text intensely, you are just as likely to dislike the criticism and find the work slow going.
   
   The assignment will be spread out over the course of the whole semester. In essence, you will do the following: find fifty critical works on a text of your choice; after some preliminary investigation, choose thirty works to comprise an annotated bibliography. Balance the distribution of works over time: for example, six works should (if possible) date from before 1955; six from 1955-1968; six from 1968-85; six from 1985 to 1995; and six from 1995 to the present. Do annotations for each of the thirty articles (or chapters from books). Arrange your bibliography chronologically from the oldest critical work to the newest. Write an introductory essay describing and analyzing what you have discovered and providing a brief account of the main trends in scholarship. Finally, offer some account of what you think drives the development (or lack thereof) that you see in this history. The essay should be ten to fifteen pages long, double-spaced.

Attendance Policy:

You should attend (and be prepared for, and participate in) all meetings of the class. If emergency prevents you, please let me know as much in advance as possible.

Written Work Policy:

Written work is due the day indicated on the schedule below unless you have asked me (and I have explicitly agreed) well ahead of time for an extension.

All written work must be submitted to me electronically, either in Word format (.doc) or in portable document format (.pdf).

Schedule

Created by: Jack Levine, English Liaison & Robert S. Knapp, Reginald F. Arragon Professor of English and Humanities