For Credit: Post an Exam Question Here!

Don't worry--you won't be committing you or your classmates to anything. But think for a moment all that you've encountered and thought about this semester in 300. Survey in your mind the depth and breadth of reading you've covered. And then consider: what sort of question would best allow you to demonstrate your learning in this class?

Propose an essay question for the 300 take-home final here. It should either (a) encourage close reading of poems from the course, (b) allow you to display interpretive and analytical skills that you have gained in your study of C18 women's poetry, (c) draw on the knowledge you have acquired in the course of the semester, or ideally, (d) some combination of (a), (b), and (c).

Deadline: Monday (5/4), noon.

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.

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.

For Credit: What is Crumble-Hall About?

Discuss. Cite a passage to illuminate your assertions.

Deadline: Friday (4/24), noon.

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.

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.