For Credit: Mrs. Shandy, mad Louisa, and Other Unfinished Business

We covered a lot of ground today in our opening discussion of the beginnings of the Gothic, but we also left some unfinished business.  Feel free to respond to this post with any thoughts about

• mad Louisa
• or any other Gothic/non-Gothic elements of Yearsley's poem
• relations (conjugal and otherwise) between Mr. and Mrs. Shandy
• or anything else that you would have liked to say in class today but didn't have a chance to.

Deadline: Wednesday (3/2), 1pm.

For Credit: It was a dark and stormy night...

This week we will begin to talk about gothic literature, but there are some preliminary issues that we have mull over before getting down to specifics. For instance, the introduction to the three stories you are reading for Wednesday provides a glimpse of the world into which gothic was born. As you can see, there was some degree of disparity between peoples' opinions of gothic fiction; some found it to be an absolutely atrocious form of writing and condemned it for having no value other than base entertainment, whereas others praised it for its ability to get the mind fully engaged in something.

As you read, consider these opinions. Which side of the argument do you find yourself leaning towards? Are the stories simply there to combat boredom, or can we learn from them? Also, which aspects of the stories might one point to if one wanted to argue in favor of their opinion or against the other?

The Reading for Wednesday: Three Gothic Stories

You can find the reading for Wednesday here, and over there in the sidebar.

For Credit: The Gothic

As I said in class on Friday, the reading for Monday is Ann Yearsley's Clifton Hill, which you will find in your poetry anthologies, and Tristram Shandy, Vol. VI, chapters 15 - 19 (pp. 391-399).  You should bring both books to class with you. 

You can respond to this post by answering the following question: what are the "Gothic" elements of Clifton Hill? 

Deadline: Monday (2/28), 1pm.

For Credit: Drama Take-Aways

So what have we learned this week?

How do this week's readings/discussions add to your evolving picture of the later C18?

What questions, observations, thoughts do you have about Sheridan's School for Scandal that you didn't have the chance to voice in class?

Deadline: Saturday (2/26), midnight.

Exeunt: Follow Up on Drama

Today's leading gentlemen and ladies realize that we presented quite an array of information pertaining to 18th century drama, but we managed to develop a few conclusions. So here's your cue to respond. Perhaps you were more favorable towards to one topic than others, so we’ll offer several questions you can respond to.

Linking 18^th century drama to contemporary drama turned out to be a successful discussion that hopefully enhanced your understanding of the material. South Park, Dave Chappelle and Saturday Night Live were notable examples. We concluded an advantage of setting satire in a fantastic world, or creating characters that were so ridiculous, is they couldn't be confused with direct reality.

Do you think direct political commentary is more effective in producing change, or whether the more artful political commentary like Vision of the Golden Rump is more effective in changing the political world?

Does the fantastic world allow for the political statements to be taken seriously, or does it diminish the real world connections?

Is a direct political statement more effective, or does it fail to catch the attention of its audience? Why?

The class also tried to identify the role of women in theater. Theater relieved some of imposed gender boundaries in reality and allowed for gender transgression. Women were able to act, deliver prologues and epilogues, declare themselves capable of writing speeches and wearing breeches. Politics were frequently addressed in theater even by women. We questioned the intention of David Garrick when he wrote Percy's prologue and The Maid of the Oaks epilogue both spoken by women. Was it meant to be satirical or advocate women’s freedom of speech? We concluded that women did indeed provide a different kind of perspective of politics (as if they were a “fly on the wall”, but it was still most likely for humor.

Do you think the epilogue or prologue reinforced or encouraged permeable gender boundaries? Was it effective for you personally or did you want to throw an orange/clementine?

Do you think it was a step forward at all in favor of women? After all, some women figures did become valuable contributors to theater.

We presented one of the celebrities of this time, Sarah Siddons. Sam intended to track some of the development of the celebrity and of the role of so a renowned figure in drama while considering her popularity with the heightened level of competition for spots in the two sanctioned playhouses of the late C18. She had a rocky start and left London to act in some lesser known places, and when she finally returned she had obviously become a more skilled actress and spent years in the public's favor, as the huge amount of contemporary images of her suggests. It was concluded that we may not always really understand a celebrity because of how the media portrays him/her. The handout of images proved how the “media” of 18^th century were irregular with their portrayal of Sarah Siddons.

Does anyone have comments they didn't share or didn't think of until later about the presence and effect of images of celebrities today?

For Credit: Sheridan's School for Scandal

Our reading for Friday is now available over in the sidebar and here, in case you lost the copy from class on Monday.  Please bring the handout or a printout to class with you on Friday.

We'll be re-creating our C18 theater from Monday and performing these two scenes as we discuss them, so be prepared to rearrange furniture.  If you would like to take a role, please feel free to e-mail me and let me know that.  If, on the other hand, you would rather die than act in front of your classmates, e-mail and let me know that, too.

The citation got cut off the in the copying and scanning, but this text is taken from Stuart Sherman, ed. The Longman Anthology of British Literature, Vol. 1C. 2d ed. (New York: Pearson Longman, 2006).

This play is the textbook (HA!) example of "sentimental comedy," a genre that flourished in the wake of the 1737 Licensing Act, to satisfy the public's desire for new theatrical repertoire without running afoul of the censors.  Sheridan was an acknowledged master of the form, and his plays (unlike many sentimental comedies) have stood the test of time and continue to be performed.  Don't be too distressed if you don't see the "sentimental" part here--that term (in its C18 sense) tends to apply more to the last act of such plays, which I haven't supplied you with.

That said, what connections do you perceive between this play and other things you have read in this course?

In the light of today's presentation, what do you make of the Prologue?

Deadline: Friday (2/25), start of class.

Gothic Drama

Today we won't have time to cover the gothic form of drama that was popular in the late C18, but it's an interesting genre so wer are posting it here so you all have the information.

With the American and French Revolutions, the 1780 anti-papist Gordon Riots and the 1778 Regency Crisis of King George III, the English were at an extreme level of insecurity as the C18 was nearing its close. In such a tumultous climate the forms of the gothic, in drama and in literature, flourished and came to be considered an early example of "mass culture" or pop culture, because people of all social classes had access to it, since producing and distributing copies of plays and novels was now inexpensive.

King George III was a particularly influential character whose struggle with insanity in the 1780s (he possible suffered from prorphyria) caused panic across the nation when the Regency Crisis of 1788 occured, when there confusion about whether or not the king should be declared legally deceased, though many politicians did not want his heir to rule, but an insance king left on the throne could have been disatrous. This crisis inspired several elements commonly seen in the gothic dramas at this time. One scholar describes the heart of these plays as "an authority figure gone mad, or at least seriously obsessive and neurotically moody" (Backsheider 162). But before his first episode of madness, the king was influencing theatre with his commission of a large "castellated palace" at Kew. The structure does not remain and contemporaries criticised the entire venture as overly eccentric and unreasonable, but the design was recreated on numerous stages with functioning bridges and towers.

Another influence was Shakespeare, whose plays had retained popularity among these audiences. Gothic playwrights favored dark tones and bloody scenes, like in Macbeth. More of what was typical in gothic plays included stock characters (the aforementioned mad aristocrat and his beautiful love interest), haunted and/or decrepit castles, storms, violence and war, robbery and death. Gothic plays also worked with the contrasting ideas of the male eye and the female breast: the eye is often a powerful, penetrating tool and women's breasts were accentuated in costumes as signifiers of femininity and vulnerability.

Readings for Wednesday

There are now links to Wednesday's readings on the C18 theater in the sidebar.

For Credit: Setting the Stage (Get it?) for 18th Century Drama

Some background information:

Although the period we're concerned with for class is generally considered to be between 1740 and 1800, the landmark event of this age in drama occurred in 1737, a Licensing Act that required the Lord Chamberlain's, a government official's, approval of any new play. The political satire embedded in the theatrical world at the time was growing more and more critical of the government, sometimes even crassly so, as you may (or may not) see in the excerpt from The Vision of the Golden Rump. This play, although never performed, was the tipping point for the establishment of the Act. Pay close attention to the descriptions, especially on the first few pages. It is perhaps helpful to know that George II was particularly known for his large posterior, and Robert Walpole, the first Prime Minister of London, was considered rotund in this time period. Official documents cite The Vision of the Golden Rump in the creation of the Licensing Act.

As you read the three texts for Wednesday, consider these questions for all three texts:

What is the tone of this piece?
Is the tone rude or unfair?
What is the piece attempting to accomplish for its audience?
Does the piece have its attended (as you define in the previous question) effect?

For Credit: Seeing a Play in the Later C18

The readings for Monday are two later C18 accounts of theater-going, penned by two of the canonical survivors of the period: Frances Burney and James Boswell.  Burney's is a fictional account, from her 1778 novel, Evelina, of the young and beautiful heroine seeing a play with her friends.  Boswell's is taken from the diary he kept while a young man trying to make his way in London, and includes two separate episodes. 

I handed these passages out in class on Friday.  If you were not there, please use the links above (or in the sidebar) to print these texts so you can read them in advance of class and bring them with you on Monday.

What particulars do these passages reveal about the experience of going to the theater and seeing a play staged?  How does the later C18 theater seem different from theater as we know it now?  What questions do you have after reading these passages?

Deadline: Monday (1/21), 1pm 

For Credit: What Have We Learned?

We've now worked through some of the minutiae of Akenside's multiple personifications and Cowper's account of Omai. 

What helpful similarities or differences do you discern between these two writers and the ways in which they appeal to and describe the emotions/sentiments?

A few additional data points:

(1) the terms "sensibility" and "sentimentality" are (as the group presenting on Wednesday pointed out) often used interchangability.  Yet critics (both in the C18 and the C21 writing about Sterne more frequently use the word "sentimentality" in discussing his work than "sensibility."

(2)  My senior colleague, Bob Markley, writes, "Sentimentality--the affective spectacle of benign generosity--emerges early in the eighteenth century less as a purely "literary" phenomenon than as a series of discursive formations that describe what amounts to an aesthetics of moral sensitivity, the ways in which middle- and upper-class men can act upon their "natural," benevolent feelings for their fellow creatures."  (Robert Markley, "Sentimentality as Performance: Shaftesbury, Sterne, and the Theatrics of Virtue," The New 18th Century, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown [New York: Methuen, 1987], p. 211). 

Discuss!

Deadline: Monday (2/21), 1pm.  Posts before midnight on Saturday (2/19) will count towards Week 5; posts after midnight will count towards Week 6.

For Credit: Readings for Friday (when all will be revealed!)

So far we have had readings that theorize sensibility and sentimentality (Hume), critique it (Wollstonecraft), satirize it (the dead Parroquet in Holt Waters) and oscillate wildly between manifesting it and ironizing it (Sterne).

So for Friday, we'll look at some straight-up expressions of unapologetically manly sensibility (and, perhaps, sentimentality).  The words "sentimentality" and "sensibility" do not appear in either of these readings, but both texts bespeak the sensibility of their authors and assume that you, the reader coming to the text with your own feeling heart, will share the feelings being expressed. 

In class we'll be looking only at excerpts from two much longer poems.  Feel free to look at the longer work--but know that we'll only be talking about the lines specified:

• In Mark Akenside's, The Pleasures of the Imagination on p. 344 - 345, lines 500 - 567 (from "---Is aught so fair..." to the end of the verse paragraph).  
• In William Cowper's The Task, "Book 1: The Sofa" on p. 541 - 543, lines 592 - 677 (the entire verse paragraph). 

You can respond to this post with some initial thoughts about these lines.  In what ways do they manifest sensibility?  Is one of them more "sentimental" than the other?  After reading Wollstonecraft's depiction of "sensibility" as weak, irrational, and effeminizing (in a bad way), what more positive view of sensibility do you get from these passages?  Alternatively--in what ways do these passages simply add to your overall bafflement?

Deadline: Friday (2/18), start of class.

For Credit: Are They Just Made Up Words?

In class today we worked together to try and find a viable definition for both sentimentality and sensibility that applied to the eighteenth century. What we found was that the task was not quite as easy as it seemed. Some tried more modern definitions of both while looking at them through the lens of the eighteenth century. Others had their ideas planted in the correct century but did not match with the popular definitions of that time.

As one person put it “I consider sensibility as relating to the mind or the powers of intellect – sense as in “common sense” and the like. Sentimentality is a term I think is more concerned with things south of the brain: from the heart to the loins - love and caring; lust and desire.”

While this definition comes close to eighteenth century thought, it differs a bit. Some of the popular eighteenth century definitions are as follows:


Sentimentalism – used to mean only affection and excessive emotional display –---used by Sir Leslie Stephen in “English Thought in the Eighteenth Century” as “the name of the mood in which we make a luxury of grief.”
-More recently –denotes the movement discerned in philosophy, politics and art, based in the belief in or hope of the natural goodness of humanity and manifested in a humanitarian concern for the unfortunate and helpless.

Often sentiment and sensibility were thought to be synonymous- however some distinctions can be made

Definitions:
• A sentiment –
1. A moral reflection, a rational opinion usually about the rights and wrongs of human conduct
2. A thought, often an elevated one, influenced by emotion. A combining of heart and head or an emotional impulse leading to an opinion or principle. (this definition comes close to sensibility)

• Sensibility-key term of the period – little used before mid century
1. –delicate emotional and physical susceptibility, the faculty of feeling, the capacity for extremely refined emotion ans a quickness to display compassion for suffering.
2. Innate sensitiveness or susceptibility revealing itself in a variety of spontaneous activities such as crying swooning, and kneeling
3. – a nice and delicate perception of pleasure and pain, beauty or deformity, which as far as it is natural, seems to depend on the organization of the nervous system.

The meanings shift over the century
As associated with women, early in the century sensibility signaled a virtuous woman but later in the century more so with promiscuity.

We also discussed some of the conventions of sentimental literature:
- arousal of pathos through conventional situations using familial stock characters and rhetorical devices – demands emotional response
- distress rarely deserved and somehow in the nature of things
- distressed are natural victims- defenseless women, aged men, helpless infants, or melancholic youth
- Discourages multiple readings, provoke tears.
- Reactive and unstable-meanders to the point
- A lot of punctuation that slows the reading down. Tends to take forever to convey what happens in an instant.
- Vocab- conventional , mannered, repetitive, overcharged
• Prescribed for instance a heart would be described with words such as, kind, honest, Tender, melting, swelling and overflowing.

My questions are: Do the definitions that we worked out in class today enhance your understanding of the reading material, either from today or previously in the class? If they do enhance your understanding which material do you understand more clearly now? Did the author use the conventions of sentimental literature listed above to convey their message? If they did use them, which ones did they use and how did they work to enhance the message of sentimentality? Do the authors use gender specific methods?

Just a Reminder: Readings for Wednesday (2/16)

The first group presentation is on Wednesday, on the issue of how sensibility and sentimentality are different.  The readings, which the group presenting has assigned, are from Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman and David Hume's Treatise on Human Nature (click on the links to get the PDFs, which are also linked to over there in the sidebar.)  You should print these out, read them, and bring them to class tomorrow.

For Credit: Shandy on Love and Sentiment

Some thoughtful answers to the attendance question, "What does Sterne mean by sentiment"?

Sterne means that "sentiment" is a lot of things, almost interchangeably, anywhere from sex to emotion to nonsense, depending on its usage, and even should something be guised as sweet, Valentine's Day-ish sentiment, it can easily and actually be nonsensical and/or lewd.


It seems like Sterne uses sentiment to mean general feeling or emotion, not love, as he so vividly separates on p. 492, but rather the ability to connect w/another human being.  

...Sterne seems to be implying that sentiment is some form of knowledge.


I'm not entirely sure, but it seems as though Sterne's use of "sentiment" is anothe rway of referring to e, or at least romantic feelings towards the opposite sex  Maybe?  It just seems, as always, as though he's being sarcastic, using another word (word play?) to hide his potential vulgarity.


Judgeing from the line "...that tender and delicious sentiment, which ever mixes in friendship, where there is a difference of sex," ["sentiment"] means feeling sexually aroused.  God forbid Shandy have a standard understanding of sentiment, where it means emotion brought on by something personal.   


Sterne' idea of sentiment, I think, is that words are less effective than it when it comes to unambiguous expression.  When he mentions love, hatred, sentiment, and nonsense, it is my belief that the sentiment speaks for the heart, whereas the others are simple trivialities.  Sentiment can be pinpointed with words, but not communicated.  Maybe...?

What do you think?  Reflect on your classmate's thoughts, in the light of class discussion, in your response to this post

Feel free to pose any questions about all things Shandy here as well.

Deadline: Friday (2/18), 1pm.

For Credit: Sensibility, a Curse or a Blessing?

Wednesday's class will discuss Sensibility and Sentiment, how the two ideals were viewed during the 18th Century, and what writers believed to be the differences between them. To get us started, I thought we would look at Sensibility through an excerpt from a poem that we came across in our research: Eliza Birch's "Ode to Insensibility." You don't have to read the entire poem, but Birch begins by saying:

With gentle pace at last I close,

All hail! Thou friend of soft repose!

Welcome now, each social charm,

Welcome, free from all alarm;

For smiling now I can defy

The pain of sensibility.

Birch calls Sensibility a "pain," and smiles when she overcomes it. She thinks that not having any emotions at all is better than feeling pain. What do you think: Is Sensibility a curse or a blessing? How would your viewpoint change if you were a woman living in the 18th century?

For Credit: Collective Brain Dump (Sensibility and Sentimentality)

The group presenting next week has been asked to address the question, "How are sentimentality and sensibility different, and why does it matter?"

To answer that question, we'll be discussing more Shandy on Monday (bring your books to class!), the readings from Wollstonecraft and Hume on Wednesday (e-mailed to you by the presenters), and some poetry (bring your anthologies to class!) on Friday.



In preparation for next week's discussions, use the response thread here to canvas what you already know about the question. In what other English courses have you discussed either sensibility or sentimentality? What were the books for which those terms were important? What is your current understanding of the term? (Don't worry about whether or not your knowledge tracks with later C18 usage of these terms--it's helpful to think about how they have changed.)

Deadline: Monday (2/14), 1pm Wednesday (2/16), 1pm.

For Credit: Your Classmates's Thoughts (UPDATED, DEADLINE EXTENDED)

Some provocative observations from the "rotating chair" handouts:

• Is Walter Shandy depresssed about Bobby's death?  He seems drained a lot throughout. 

• Mr. Shandy appears very well-read of classic philosophers.  He seems depressed over Bobby's death, but I feel like he is still depressed, outside of his son's death. 

• Whiskers reminds me of my linguistics class, which talked about how words are arbitrary and we assign meaning to them.  All words could mean anything, but in this scenario it means something vulgar.  Is Sterne just ahead of his time, pointing out the sign/signifier that I learned in 301?   

•  Why doesn't he adequately explain anything? Like the fiddle metaphor, how is one supposed to get to that? And why can't he describe his accidental circumcision, so I could actually read that information correctly.  He has 150 pages of additional notes.  Why?

• Somebody mentioned that there was a lot to say about eavesdropping despite a short build-up to Mrs. Shandy's accusation of an affair on Walter's part.  I think that in truth the importance of this section is to illustrate how conversations take place between different people and in different places of the household.  The emphasis is on eavesdropping and misunderstandings and the way that misunderstandings might influence worldview.

And from a blog thread below:

• Mrs. Shandy...is an after-thought in the family hierarchy. It is really sad that no one thought to inform her that Bobby died. She just seems very involuntary and loopy as a mother. In an odd way Uncle Toby is more involved in the family and has a higher role than the mother. His has an integral part of the family, and in Tristam's narrative because he is the source of most of Tristam's information about his childhood.

Discuss! 

Deadline: Friday (2/11), 1pm. Monday (2/14), 1pm.  Posts before midnight Saturday count toward Week 4; posts after midnight Saturday count toward Week 5.

For Credit: Johnson on Fiction

Johnson by Sir Joshua Reynolds

Samuel Johnson's Rambler No. 4 was the one of the first efforts by a literary critic to define and assess the then-new genre of the novel.

To what extent do Johnson's assumptions about fiction track with our 21st century understanding? What points would most readers today share with him, and where does the 21st century reader part company with him?

Deadline: Friday (2/11), 1pm.

For Credit: Don't Return Shandy to the Bookstore Yet!

As I said, you should bring Shandy to class on Friday, and there may be some more Shandy for Monday, the way things are shaping up for the first group presenting. And we will be returning to it intermittently throughout the semester.

To follow up on today's class, though: what further illumination do you now have into the characters of (a) Mrs. Shandy and (b) Uncle Toby?

Deadline: Friday (2/11), 1pm.

For Credit: Tristram Shandy Grab-Bag

Here are some things I'll be asking about in class tomorrow.  You can get a head start on discussion by responding to any of them--or any part of them--(just specify which question you're answering in your response).

• What are some of the different effects that the death of Brother Bobby has on the various members of the Shandy household?
• Corporal Trim and Sir Walter Shandy carry on two parallel orations on the subject of death.  How are their speeches similar or different?
• What's the deal with whiskers?
• What various things do you learn about Uncle Toby throughout the reading assigned for tomorrow?  What sort of a person is he?  What particular clues do you get to his character?
• What do you learn about Mrs. Shandy in the reading?
• What are relations like between masters/mistresses and servants in the Shandy household?
• What further information do you get about the narrator's writing process, attitudes, beliefs, assumptions?
• What's the point of the paragraph of near-nonsense on p. 335 (V.xv)?
• On p. 339 (V.xvii), young Tristram is inadvertently circumcised.  How does it happen?  Who, according to the narrative, is most to blame, and why?  What do the reactions of the various characters to this event tell you about them?
• (For what it's worth, the asterisks in the big paragraph on p. 339 correspond precisely to the number of letters in the words that have been omitted.  Who can guess what "*******   ***" and "****  ***  ** ***  ******" stand for?)

Deadline: Wednesday (2/9), 1pm.

For Credit: On Your Own with Tristram Shandy

Okay, I talked you through the first few pages of Tristram Shandy.  Now have a go at it on  your own.  Help each other out.  What do you get from the 50-iah pages you've been assigned?  Where do you find yourself stuck?  What seems amusing?  Noteworthy?  Clever?  Unusual?  Alternatively, where do you find yourself getting irritated?

As I mentioned in class, you might find this page helpful--there's a brief run-down of the main characters, plus an outline of the novel as a whole.

Deadline: Wednesday (2/9), 1pm.

Reminder: Bring Tristram Shandy to Class Tomorrow (NOT poetry anthology!)

I said the wrong thing in class on Friday.  We've spent enough time with later C18 poetry.  You need some time to get acquainted with later C18 prose (through the works of Laurence Sterne and Samuel Johnson) before we embark on the student presentations.  So bring Shandy to class, along with your first assignments.

Answers to Questions about the First Assignment

In the thread below, SMR and Cholie  had a cluster of similar concerns about the expectations for this assignment, which I suspect others might share.  My response got so big that it will be easier to read as a separate post, anyway, so here goes...

Cholie and SMR are asking the right questions and worrying about the right things.   And as SMR presciently observes, that IS part of the point!  The goal of this assignment is NOT to give me a way to (a) reward those who come to the class with extensive vocabularies and background knowledge and (b) punish everyone for not already knowing all about the later C18. 

No.   

The goals is to give you some guided practice in the frustrating, complicated, uncertain, and circuitous ways that literary history gets constructed out of the past.  If you’re finding it hard, and you’re questioning everything you think you know, then you’re doing it right.   

Down to specifics...

The Oxford English Dictionary

The OED (available only through the UIUC library website) can be a great resource for this assignment, but it IS frustrating to use.  It seeks to capture the full complexity of words and the ways their meanings change over time—and it relies on the interpretive skill of the reader to resolve gray areas.  So you get some definitions, but you mostly get real-life textual examples from the range of time the word has been in use.  When you’re trying to gloss a word from the C18, it’s often helpful to pay more attention to the OED examples than the definition—look for the ones that are dated closest to the texts we’re working with, and see if the word is being used in similar ways (and be aware that there may be a few different ways that the word gets used).  If you aren’t finding the word, make sure you’re spelling it right—after all, you’re looking at a printout of a scan of a really really old book, and the type isn't always as readable as one would like.  Sometimes it’s easy to read an “r” and “n” together as an “m” or to miss the fact that v’s sometimes get substituted for u’s and I’s for J’s.  Also, be open to the possibility that the typesetter made a mistake and transposed letters, added an extra one, or left something out—it happens!.

Other Places to Look for Information

By all means, feel free to look to other resources to help you understand the poem or make your footnotes more accurate.  It never hurts to Google, but there are resources available within the UIUC library site that may get you to helpful information faster: the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the Literature Resource Center. 

The Standard of Accuracy for Your Footnotes?

As for the accuracy of your footnotes—give it your best shot!  I won’t take points off for people not knowing what they don’t know or for not recognizing a misinterpretation when they’re making it (though I’ll probably point it out, just for future information).   But if a poem has puzzling or opaque elements that you haven’t at least tried to explain, I will take points off.  Keep in mind that “giving it your best shot” is the best that the most renowned scholars can do.  When I’m teaching out of one of the Longman anthologies, I routinely come across footnotes that annoy the hell out of me, because I think the editors have misrepresented things or not quite gotten the point--or are flat-out wrong.  And if I am ever in the position of editing such an anthology, no doubt others will have the same reaction to my footnoting decisions.  It’s not that we’re all stupid—it’s that the past is a complicated place, and nobody can be right about it all the time.  But if everyone gives it their best shot, and seeks to reconcile disagreement in a spirit of goodwill and collegiality, then we stand a better chance of understanding its complexities.

But My Poem Has No Redeeming Social or Literary Value!

Don’t worry too much about picking a poem that will stand the test of time or is a brilliant work of literature.  If there’s something about it that interests you, that’s enough!  It’s good if the nature of your attraction to the poem is something that other readers might share, rather than something specific to you (e.g., “It’s interesting how this poem depicts the details of 18^th-century shopkeeping” rather than “I like this poem because I’ve spent a lot of time helping out in my uncle’s hardware store”).  

The Headnote

If there's really nothing to say about the poem in a headnote, then it's probably not a great choice.  Keep in mind, the suggested length for your headnote doesn't give you a lot of space for the kind of detailed biographical and textual information that you get in the Blackwell anthology or a Longman survey textbook, so try and keep the focus on information that will help another reader arrive more quickly at the things that make the poem interesting and the understanding you have after spending some time with the poem.

For Credit: Poetry of the Later C18 (Putting It All Together)

So in addition to the framing knowledge you brought to this course (Pope/Swift and Blake/Wordsworth), you now have some additional data points:

• Joseph Warton's "The Dying Indian" (a largely forgotten C18 work by a representative literary figure, but one that neatly exemplifies several of the claims in Northrop Frye's essay on later C18 poetry)
• Gray's Elegy (which many of you had already encountered: a high-literary work entrenched in the canon, but increasingly inaccessible to modern readers due to its arcane vocabulary and latinate sentence structure)
• Mary Leapor's Epistle to Artimesia (increasingly part of the revisionist C18 canon, due to its exploration of gender issues and the poetic vocation as experienced by a laboring class woman)
• Mary Jones's Holt Waters (off the map of known literature of the later C18 and of dubious literary merit, but in its way representative of the quantities of verse penned, published, read, and valued in the later C18)
• Frye's essay, which outlines some of the challenges of categorizing this period and identifies some key characteristics that apply to some (but not necessarily all) of the poetry of this period.
• Your work on ECCO

So what have you learned?  What seem to be the key take-aways from your initial exploration in C18 poetry in this course?  What further questions do you have at this stage?  How have the poems you found in ECCO confirmed or complicated your understanding of C18 poetry?

Respond with answers to whichever of those questions seems most pressing.

Deadline: Monday (2/7), 1pm.  Posts before midnight Saturday (2/5) will count towards Week 3; posts after midnight Saturday (2/5) will count towards Week 4.

For Credit: Adventures in ECCO (deadline extended and bumped)

As you embark on the 1st assignment, feel free to ask questions, describe any frustrations you encounter working with ECCO, compare notes on your findings, or reflect on the task here. Feel free to ask questions, as well--I'll be checking this thread frequently over the weekend.

Deadline: Friday (2/4), 1pm Monday (2/7), start of class.

For Credit: The Poetry of Process

The reading for Friday (2/4) is Northrop Frye's influential essay, "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility." Note that I say "influential" and not "accurate" or "masterful." There are reasons why I'm assigning this essay, but giving you a definitive answer to the question, "What is Later C18 Literature?" is not one of them.

Rather, the essay is one smart, thoughtful answer to that question--but not necessarily the best or most complete one. Testing your observations against it will help you to find answers of your own. When Frye wrote this essay in 1956, Gray and Warton were definitely on his map of relevant writers (note that Gray is one of our "Survivors" and Warton is not). However, the work of Mary Jones ("Holt Waters") or Mary Leapor ("Epistle to Artimesia") probably hadn't crossed his path. He may have heard of Phillis Wheatley (another of our "Survivors"), but she does not appear in his essay.

Do Frye's conclusions about later C18 Lit. apply, even though our data set is different from his?

Think specifically about Frye's remarks about "the literature of process." How does he define that term, and how do you see the poems we've read embodying that definition? Pick one example of a moment, image, or excerpt from one of the poems we've read, and show how it either bears out Frye's claims about later C18 literature as a "literature of process"--or not.

Deadline: Friday (2/4), 1pm.

For Credit: Snow Day Reading!

Since class isn't meeting tomorrow, here is the poem I was planning to spring on you.  It was published in 1750 by a poet who appears in your Blackwell anthology: Mary Jones.  The texts you'll be working with on ECCO (for the first assignment and your group projects) will look a lot like this one, so you'll get some practice reading the funny-looking s's-that-look-like-f's, as well as grappling with some of the now-familiar challenges of C18 verse.  I've already made copies of the poem to distribute in class, so don't print this one out unless you really hate reading on a screen.

Respond to this post with

• questions about this poem,
• provisional/speculative explanations of what it's about, OR
• accounts of your reading process (where do you get stuck/baffled?)

This poem doesn't get you off the hook for the Northrop Frye essay that you need to read for Friday--but it's short, and relatively straightforward compared to the poems you've been wrestling with.

Your first assignment is still due on Monday.  I'll be holding office hours on Friday (3 - 4, 321 English Bldg.) to make up for the missed office hour Wednesday.

Deadline: Friday (2/4), 1pm.