Wednesday, April 29, 2009

New Course Offering! Tell your Friends!

It's not in the system yet, but it will be in a day or two. Meets Group I requirements.


Before Victoria Had a Secret: Sex and Sentiment in Early Modern England (late-breaking English 300 offering)

MWF 1pm


In this course, you will explore the literary depiction of desire before the Victorian era. Instead of the repressive decorum that often gets associated with the sexuality of earlier times, you will encounter a fluid and changing world, where sexuality is celebrated, feared, debated, encouraged, scorned and expressed, by men and women alike. Through close reading of a broad swathe of primary texts, you will learn to interpret the language of early modern desire, to investigate the relationships between genre and expression, to register the significance of race and class to issues of gender, and to engage productively in critical disagreement. Readings will take you from the frank eroticism of Restoration coterie poetry, to the libidinal peregrinations of James Boswell and Fanny Hill, from the containment of female desire in Frances Burney’s Evelina, to the polymorphous perversity of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk.

Friday, April 24, 2009

For Credit: The Object of Leapor's Critique?

Changing "Edgecote Hall" to "Crumble-Hall" for her poem suggests that Leapor has some larger game in mind than simply describing a house.

Class discussion today brought forward a number of elements in the poem that might suggest what that larger purpose is:

  • unlike most writers of country-house poems she includes people (Biron in the study and "the menial Train")
  • she contrasts past, present, and future
  • she invokes a muse AND an implied reader/tour participant
  • she contrasts interior and exterior, house and garden, man-made and natural
  • she frames the poem with two meals

Which of these elements of the poem strike you as most significant? Alternatively, how might these elements be working together? Just how satirical/critical is Leapor's tone? What is her atttude toward the country house and its owners? Does "Man the Monarch" display any continuities with Leapor's passages of natural description in "Crumble-Hall"?

Choose whatever dimension of this poem interests you most and continue the discussion here.

Deadline: Monday (4/27), noon.

Thursday, April 23, 2009

For Credit: What is Crumble-Hall About?

Discuss. Cite a passage to illuminate your assertions.

Deadline: Friday (4/24), noon.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

So this has nothing to do with poetry, but I have to express my .... I don't know if outrage is the right word, but it works.

Just follow this link:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

I just stared in disbelief for awhile and then I became morbidly interested and kind of want to read it, but I know it will be the death of that book for me.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Midsemester Project Paper Rewrites: The Deal

When I handed back the longer papers on the poets you researched, I gave provisional grades and the promise of rewriting for a higher grade. I also said I would give you a written explanation of how the rewrites would work. Here it is. You get credit in two ways for the rewrite: as a component of the midsemester project and as part of your final exam grade. As follows:

I. Rewrite the paper and I will use the point totals for the revision to calculate your grade on the midsemester project. In other words, your grade on the first version of the paper disappears, to be replaced by the later version. The grading rubric will be identical to that used on the first version of the paper.

II. The effort you put into the revision will be evaluated and count for 30% of the final exam. To determine that part of the final exam grade, I will use a different rubric from the one that I use to calculate your grade on the midsemester project. I'm e-mailing to everyone the rubric I'll use to evaluate improvement in your paper.

Please note that the grades on I and II are to some degree independent of each other. That is, it is possible to go from a B to a B+ on part one of the assignment by simply cleaning up the mechanical errors noted on the original paper, but that kind of limited improvement will achieve only a fraction of the available points for the final exam grade.

Revised papers will be due 5/8 (Friday) in my mailbox--after the last day of class but before the final exam. Please note that you'll need to hand in the marked-up original of the paper in order to get final exam credit for the revision!

Please feel free to ask questions by responding to this post.

For Credit: Three Voices of Critique

As I specified in class on Monday, in class tomorrow (Wednesday) we'll be discussing Sarah Fyge Egerton's "The Liberty" (Blackwell anthology p. 11 - 12) and Mary Leapor's "Man the Monarch." Both of these poems speak to a theme we discussed with relation to the two Anne Finch poems, "Introduction" and "The Apology": the woman poet's sense of constraint or limitation stemming from her gender.

The question for you to consider: what differences do you see between (a) the way these three poets depict that sense of constraint and (b) the specific sources of constraint or limitation that they identify?

Deadline: Wednesday (4/22), noon.

Sunday, April 19, 2009

For Credit: New Challenges in Writing

The third paper you're writing for this course requires you to exercise some different mental skills than the other writing you've done so far. Reflect here on what kinds of challenges this paper topic is presenting for you.

Deadline: Wednesday (4/22), noon.

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

For Credit: Essays for Third Paper

Over there in the right-hand sidebar is the topic for the third paper, along with the three articles you can choose among for writing it.

The three articles vary a great deal, and each will present different challenges for writing a critique.

The Doody article is the one that lines up most squarely with the time frame for our readings, and it may be the most clearly written of the three--but though it is perhaps the easiest to read, it may be difficult to find a standpoint from which to pick some critical holes in it.

The Jackson and Prins essy, "Lyrical Studies," is the most recent of the three essays and perhaps the hardest to get a handle on. It's also firmly oriented, though, towards the C19, which may make it a bit easier to write about (once you understand what it's arguing). You can ask, as you read along, "how do these claims NOT apply to the earlier poets we've been reading?" "what here is more generally characteristic of women's poetry than the authors assume?" "how are these claims about poetry not taking into account earlier poetry by women?" Answers to questions like those may give you some interesting avenues for writing.

Mellor's "The Female Poet and the Poetess" is perhaps the most influential of these three essays--it gets referred to a lot (Backscheider makes mention of it, and Jackson and Prins clearly have it in mind, as do most critics who choose the term "poetess" over "poet.") It describes historical phenomena that, according to Mellor, largely begin with early Romanticism--precisely the sort of arguable yet plausible claim that can give you room for a good counterargument based on your reading (much of which has been pre-1780).

We'll be talking about these essays on Friday. Here, though, feel free to identify anything in these essays that you're finding particularly baffling, ask any questions that would help you make more sense of this reading, or try out any fledgling ideas about how to write about this material.

Deadline: Friday (4/17), noon.

Monday, April 13, 2009

Emily Was Right! It was A Totally Different Poem. OMG.

Wow--in my zeal to give you all Lonsdale's belittling summary of Carter's achievement I managed to overlook the fact that Carter wrote (at least) two poems about Elizabeth Singer Rowe, and that the poem published in Lonsdale's anthology is NOT the same poem I posted on the blog (which as Emily pointed out, is much longer and goes on to the next page). See those close reading skills in action? It takes a Ph.D. to get it THAT wrong.

Ahem.

Anyone care to comment on the interesting differences between the two poems? (If you missed class today or lost your handout, the Carter poem I distributed is available in the sidebar).

Anyone care to read a little Rowe, now that she's inadvertently come up 2x with relation to Carter? Here's an elegy she wrote on her dead husband--evidence that some C18 women did in fact love their male life partners (and yes, if you click on the window, you will find the poem extends for a couple more pages).

Text not available
The Miscellaneous Works, in Prose and Verse, of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe By Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Theophilus Rowe, Thomas Rowe

Thursday, April 9, 2009

For Credit: Links in the Chain

Milcah Martha Moore's book includes Hannah Griffitt's reflections on the poems of Elizabeth Carter. Elizabeth Carter's Poems On Several Occasions (1762) is probably the work that Griffitts was familiar with; it includes the following poem, on another female poet, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, who wrote on religious things and was enormously popular in North America as well as England during the C18. Here's the poem, from the 1825 edition of Carter's collected works (edited by her nephew):

Text not available
Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, With a New Edition of Her Poems, Some of which Have Never Appeared Before; to which are Added, Some Miscellaneous Essays in Prose, Together with Her Notes on the Bible, ... By Montagu Pennington, Elisabeth Carter

Your thoughts?

For Credit: Elizabeth Carter

On Wednesday, we read Griffitt's poem in praise of Elizabeth Carter. Here's what Roger Londsdale has to say about her, in his anthology, C18 Women Poets:
Early in her career, Elizabeth Carter did much to make the woman writer "respectable," taking advantage of the new opportunities offered by the periodical press, dealin gconfidently from an early age with publishers and literary men, and dedicating herslef to impressive scholarship, without arousing the mockery or hostility usually directed at women who wrote professionally or at "learned ladies," For thse reasons she was often cited and hailed with some awe as an exemplary figure for women. Having won high literary reputation and financial security by the 1760s, she did not thereafter develop this inspirational role. Her elegant and decorous, if relatively small, output of verse was highly influential...but its effect was mostly inhibiting. An obituary praised the "Sublime simplicity of sentiment, melodious sweetness of expression, and morality the most amiable" in her poems, but her nephew and biographer granted her "ease, correctness, and elegance" rather than "fire or strength." She is perhaps doomed to be best remembered for Johnson's intended compliment, that "My old friend, Mrs. Carter, could make a pudding as well as translate Epictetus." (Lonsdale 166-167)


There's a tone of disappointment to this narrative; Lonsdale seems to think that Carter somehow let the team down. Without having read Carter's work, you are not in a position to evaluate the "fire and strength" of her verse, but as readers of a broad swathe of C18 women's poetry, you do have a context for evaluating the interpretive frame Lonsdale puts around it, particularly given the very different spin that Griffits gives it in #92, "By the same on reading Eliza. Carters poems" (p. 263-264). Your reflections?

For Credit: The Poems We'll Be Talking About Friday

This week, we're transitioning from the mapping of C18 women's poetry--what's out there, what are the various kinds of experience depicted in poetry, who's writing it and why, what does and doesn't get said in verse--to questions about what it all adds up to. What interesting interpretive claims can one make about C18 women's poetry (or any coherent subset thereof)? What are the key contextual questions to ask? What does the study of this body of literature tell us about the world that we didn't already know?

Obviously, an effort to answer those questions with reference to the whole of C18 women's poetry will result in claims that are so vague as to be useless. So let's start by trying to come to some interpretive conclusions about the particular subset of C18 women's poetry brought together in Martha Milcah Moore's book. Let me ask again the question I put on the board on Wednesday: To what extent (and how) does Martha Milcah Moore's book express/articulate/give voice to a feminist consciousness? Or to put the question another way, what does it matter that most of the poems included in MMM's book are by women?

In addition to the poems and prose from the book that we've been talking about this week, here are a couple of others that might be read as speaking directly to these women's awareness of the gendered parameters of their lives:

85. To the Memory of Sarah Morris... (p. 253-255): she was well-known Quaker preacher, who spoke not only within her own congregation but travelled widely to preach in other places.

99. On reading the Adventurer World &c. (p. 270-272): Griffitts here critiques British women based on their representation in British periodicals of the time.

We'll be talking about these poems in class on Friday. Feel free to respond here with your reflections on the MMM poems we've been reading this week, the issue of how the poets in the book treat their specifically female experience of the world, or more broadly, the question of the broader interpretive questions to which C18 women's poetry can supply useful or provocative answers.

Thursday, April 2, 2009

For Credit: Writing Process

Take a step back for a moment from the literary content of this course, and consider instead the fact that it is an Advanced Composition class. Bracketing the frustrations of the particular assignment I've saddled you with, what kinds of more general problems in academic writing would you like to work on? What do you find particularly difficult when you write academic papers for your lit. courses? What writing skills do you feel like you need to develop further? When you start working on an academic writing assignment, was aspects of the task seem most daunting, even baffling?

Reflect here on your own writing process, and those aspects of it that you would like to work on improving.

Deadline: Friday (4/3), noon.