For Credit: The Jacobins

Many of you may have heard of the Jacobins before in other English or history courses. During the French Revolution, Jacobins were members of the Jacobin Club. The Jacobin Club was arguably the most notorious political club during the Revolution largely due to their radical support of the Revolution. The term Jacobin assumed a larger context, eventually applied to anyone in support of revolutionary opinions. The term manifested in English culture upon the creation of George Canning’s newspaper “The Anti-Jacobin.” Much like the French who supported the French Revolution were labeled Jacobins, so were British citizens who shared this sentiment.

In Canning’s poem “New Morality” he writes “Condorcet filter’d through the dregs of Paine, each pert adept disowns a Briton’s part, and plucks the name of England from his heart” (3). Canning specifically mentions Thomas Paine, one of the primary influences of the English Jacobins. He connects Paine with this anti-nationalistic sentiment that embodies the arguments leveled against the Jacobins. Paine’s “Rights of Man” argued that political revolutions are acceptable when a government ceases protecting the individual and natural rights of its citizens.

After reading both Canning’s poem and “Ode to Jacobinism”, how do these texts frame the Jacobins? Are they seen as a threat or just a temporary fad? Also, what do these texts suggest about the political culture in England?

For Credit: The Amours of Uncle Toby, or Sublime Smut?

As you work through Volumes 8 and 9 of Tristram Shandy in preparation for class on Monday, feel free to post here about (a) any passages that seem particularly impenetrable; (b) any passages you think you might grasp but would like confirmation of; (c) any questions you have.

Some specific questions you might want to think about:

1. "Not touch it for the world!" why does this phrase "overheat" the narrator's imagination?

2. Is it just smut, or is it sublime? Is "sublime smut" really a...thing?

3. What causes Toby to fall in love?

4. Does the narrator distinguish sheer lust from a deeper emotional connection? How? Where?

5. Why, ultimately, don't things work out between Toby and the Widow Wadman? Where is the, so to speak, climax of their courtship?

6. Is love sublime? Is sex? Does the narrator think so?

Deadline: Monday (4/18), start of class.

For Credit: Sublimity Debriefing

Feel free to pull together our analysis/discussion/exploration of the sublime here, with any questions you would like to ask, reflections you would like to offer, or observations you would have liked to make in class but didn't have the opportunity to.

Deadline: Monday (4/18), start of class.

For Credit: Is Tristram Shandy Sublime?

The title is the question we'll be raising in class on Friday and Monday. Since you all have paper proposals due Friday, I won't expect you to do a lot of reading for class on Friday, but you should bring Tristram Shandy to class on Friday and plan to do some reading in it over the weekend.

To sort out the sublimity (or not) of Tristram Shandy we'll be focusing on the character of Uncle Toby, and particularly his amours with the Widow Wadman. This material takes up most of volumes 8 and 9 of the book, so that's what you should plan to read (as much as you can) over the weekend (some passages in there you will recognize from previous readings and class discussion). It will reward your study. As Sterne points out, "the following memoirs of my uncle Toby's courtship of widow Wadman...turn out one of the most compleat systems, both of the elementary and practical part of love and love-making that ever was addressed to the world" (VI.36, p. 420).

Tomorrow, we'll look at Sterne's set-up for these episodes, looking at some excerpts from the passages where Sterne explains Toby's war sound and how it leads him to build miniature fortifications in his garden (I.25-II.5, p. 68 - 88) and the relationship between love-making and literary narration (VI.20-VI.40, p. 420 - 427).

Our discussion Monday will conclude our study of Tristram Shandy, clearing the way for the Castle of Otranto which we will discuss the following week.

Some bloggy questions you can respond to in preparation for class tomorrow (feel free to answer any one of them--just specify which!):

1. In what ways does it make sense to connect sublimity to Tristram Shandy?
2. If you have had a chance to browse around in some of the passages that I mentioned above, what questions or observations do you have?
3. What's the significance of the squiggly lines on p. 425? Is this just a piece of random, gimmicky preciousness on Sterne's part, or does it convey an idea of substance and significance?

Deadline: Friday (4/15), 1pm.

For Credit: Can One Experience the Sublime on the Internet?

Well????

Respond to this post with a link. Or an analysis of whether someone else's link is sublime, beautiful, or sublime-according-to-a-post-C18-conception-of sublimity.

If your link has audio, please post lyrics, a captioned version, or a transcription if at all possible.

Deadline: Friday (4/15), 1pm.

The Sublime: Drawing Conclusions?

During our discussion today, we looked at several different perspectives on the sublime and its interpretations. To begin with, we noted the similarities and differences between Burke’s and Kant’s ideas of the sublime. In doing so, we established some binaries that most scholars consider to be important to the understanding of the sublime: order vs. chaos, pleasure vs. terror, confined vs. boundless, and the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime.

Next, we split into groups to discuss some specific questions from Edward Young’s Night Thoughts. We found a tremendous amount of sublime imagery, from the vastness of the night sky to comparisons between God and worms. Through attempts to illustrate Young’s sublime mentalities, we began to explore the impossibility of truly conveying and quantifying a sublime experience. Additionally, we considered the concept of time and its use as a both a rational tool of order and an apparatus derived from the sublime.

Finally, we perused Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s “A Summer Evening’s Meditation” to push our understanding of the sublime into the realm of gendered differences. These differences in experience between a “male” and a “female” sense of the sublime hearken back to the binaries considered at the beginning of class. We concluded by analyzing the difference between an unrestrained sublime that is impossible to account for and a more reassuring definition of the sublime in which we are able to rationalize the infinite and terrifying aspects of a sublime experience.

These final thoughts bring us to an interesting impasse. In order to discuss the sublime in class today, we followed an assignment with ordered instructions, posted questions, and attempted to reach finite conclusions about a subject that, by definition, is supposed to be too large to understand or quantify. Is this the proper way to go about studying the sublime? Can an author (or in the case of William Blake, an artist of any kind) really convey a sublime experience for readers to fully grasp? Or should a different approach be taken? What might that approach be?

FYI: Readings on the Sublime

The readings for Wednesday are over there in the sidebar, in case you missed the e-mail. In addition to these two texts you should read "A Summer Evening's Meditation," which you can find in your poetry anthologies. Please print everything out and bring it to class to refer to, along with the poetry anthologies.

On Friday we will address the question: Is Tristram Shandy sublime?

For Credit: The Sublime

The Sublime as we understand it today wasn’t conceptualized until the 18^th century. Up until this point it had been scantly examined and was understood apart from the aesthetic context of which it is now inherently linked. During the 18^th century, perhaps precipitated by the enlightenment agenda, examination of the Sublime garnered the attention of many prominent philosophers and intellectuals of relevant disciplines. The foremost contributors were philosophers Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. Both offered unique interpretations, which, though momentarily conflict, are for the most part mutually supportive and concerted.

The primary distinction they agreed upon, and that which is contemporarily most attributed to the notion of the Sublime, is its dissimilarity with beauty. Despite the likeness of the pleasure they induce, beauty and the Sublime are distinct from each other. Whereas beauty is the result of form, continuity and limitation, sublimity is the result of chaos, uncertainty and infinity. The sublime has a power incomprehensible to the observer in both range and force. This uncertainty elicits a particular terror, akin to the pleasure incited by beauty.

Kant and Burke, however, do differ on additional points of emphasis. Burke believes the observer’s particular terror is simply a heightened sense of fear in the face of something far more powerful than himself. Kant focuses not on the individual’s physical awareness, but on her spiritual awareness. He says that when people are confronted with the sublime, their resultant fearfulness stems from the sense of an unrestrained, unintentional magnificence,. This sense of unhindered might is due to the absence of an artist. Therefore, Kant’s Sublime can only be natural, not synthetic. The observance of manmade objects can’t but be affected by the artist’s intent. The observer simply can’t help but infer the artwork’s purpose. It’s purposefulness in the absence of intended purpose that elicits fear within the observer of the sublime. Therefore the sublime is strictly subjective. The observer instinctively assumes purpose in something so immense and grand, in spite of the absence of an actual creator. This condition engenders fearfulness in the observer, but it’s not a physical fear; it’s a spiritual one.

After perusing Anna Laetitia Barbauld's “A Summer Evening’s Meditation” and Edward Young’s“Night Thoughts,” which understanding of the Sublime would you attribute to each author?

For Credit: Third Paper Assignment

You can find the prompt for the third paper assignment here, and over there in the "Helpful Pages" sidebar box.

Questions? Perplexity? Confusion? Venting about the peculiar challenges presented by this assignment? Random thoughts and ideas? Feel free to post them here.

Deadline: Saturday (4/16), midnight.

For Credit: Getting a Bead on the White Bear

For Monday, have a look at the list of books that Thomas Jefferson recommends for his friend (I handed it out in class today, but it's also over there in the sidebar).

What strikes you as noteworthy, interesting, significant about the list?

How does it differ from the list of works (many read in excerpted form) that we've accumulated over the course of the semester?

How does it differ from the equivalent list that one might receive today if one asked a learned older friend for a recommended reading?

Deadline: Monday (4/11), 1pm. Posts before midnight on Saturday (4/9) count for Week 11, after that it's Week 12.

For Credit: Two Ways to Follow-Up on Literary Forgeries

Feel free to respond to either of the following questions:

(1) What reflections or observations do you have on the excerpts (handed out in class today, and available over there in the sidebar) recording the reactions of Samuel Johnson and Thomas Jefferson to the works of Ossian?

(2) Next week, our topic for discussion will be "The Sublime." "Sublime" is a word that got applied a lot to the works of Ossian/MacPherson. Why? What do you understand "sublime" to mean, and how does it apply to Ossian's "Fragments""

Deadline: Monday (4/11), 1 pm. Posts before Saturday (4/9) midnight count towards week 11; posts after that count toward Week 12.

For Credit: The Buddy Holly of 1770?

Or James Dean?  Or Kurt Cobain?  Or...think of any young doomed genius.  Part of the enduring appeal of Chatterton has been his untimely demise at the age of 17, ending the possibility of future works of genius.  Is Chatterton the archetype for subsequent versions of this story?


lyrics here

But the myth hangs from the genius of the artist who has died too soon. Chatterton's poems continued to be influential and widely read, even after they were widely known to have been creations of the 18th century, not the 15th.

Why? For Friday, look over the poems the group presented on Wednesday, and add to the mix "An Excelente Balade of Charitie" (p. 455 - 458).

Two ways to respond to this post:
(1) Explore the content of any of the Chatterton poems assigned: What story are they telling or what argument are they making?
(2) Explore the aesthetic dimension of these poems: What are the pleasures of Chatterton's poetry? What (apart from the faux ancient spelling) sets it apart from the other poetry you have encountered in this class? What about it would have felt fresh, original, or particularly inspired to a C18 reader?

Deadline: Friday (4/8), 1pm.

Literary Forgery Review

Our group would like to thank everyone for participating in the discussions and doing the group assignments. It was good to hear everyone’s ideas and thought’s on what the readings meant to you and how you felt about literary forgery.

In class we discussed two writers James MacPherson and Thomas Chatterton. They are the two most popular literary figures known for forgery during the 18 century. It was important for this to be discussed because it had an impact on how literature began to be reviewed and read. As discussed in class, though these works were known forgeries people still felt the need to go out and purchase their works and indulge in them. Someone in the class mentioned that these works could be viewed “as a guilty pleasure”. This was an agreeable and interesting comment because it expressed how one looked at their works from a reader’s point of view instead of a critic or another literary writer.

When we discussed MacPherson and the class was broken up into groups it was good when we came back together and were able to hear and understand the classes’ thoughts on the work. One person referred to work as resembling Shakespeare because of the complicated plot. Thought the plot was complicated and the works were known to be forgeries the class felt as if it did not take away from the works purpose seeing as it was fiction and it used as a source of entertainment. We were able to have a great discussion about MacPherson as well as Chatterton and come up with several ideas of how and why they chose to write forgeries and what affects it had on the readers.

To end, something that everyone seemed to feel the same about it that though these writers were forgers they did have talent themselves. This was more elaborated on when we discussed Thomas Chatterton because the group tried to point out imperfections with his poem that made it a forgery and this task was rather complicated to do. After this it was pointed out the same errors that helped identify the forgery was due to spelling, grammar, and the uses of different words. Skilled writers had to decipher between what was forged or not therefore we know that these writers had to be knowledgeable enough to know who to manipulate their way around older works in order to pass them off. This was mostly agreed upon by the class.

For a final remark……If anyone has any questions about literary forgery that was not answered or discussed in class feel free to post.

Question: Do you think that MacPherson or Chatterton lost respect or gained respect by writers and reader after their work was exposed as being forgery's? What would have been your stance on the situation if you were the critic?

The Readings for Wednesday (Literary Forgery)

Three of the four readings for Wednesday are now over there in the sidebar: two "Fragments" from MacPherson's Poems of Ossian and a poem by Chatterton.  The fourth reading is in your poetry anthology: Chatterton's "Mynstrelles Song."  You should print out the readings (they are very short!) and bring your anthology to class on Wednesday.

A word of advice about making sense of Chatterton's poetry: read it aloud.  Don't try to muscle through to understanding it, just say the words aloud--declaim them to your cat or your housemate if you need to.  All those strange clusters of consonants and arbitrary vowels will resolve themselves into meaning (and your cat/housemate will be edified).

For Credit: Literary Forgeries

Up until now, our themes have been rather broad topics. This week, we will be taking on something different. Literary forgeries themselves are not a difficult concept to grasp. An author writes a piece of work, claiming to be the work of another well known author, taking on this writer's style. This forger will sometimes go as far as attempting to recreate the original manuscript, to make the claim seem more authentic. Producing an unknown work by a well known author can bring money and fame to anyone who “finds” one. In class on Wednesday, we will discuss two of the more famous forgers during the 18^th Century.

We gave you two readings from James MacPherson. He was a Scottish writer, poet, and politician . After traveling to Scottland, MacPherson claimed to have discovered ancient Gaelic poetry and went about translating them to English. He published Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem in Six Books, together with Several Other Poems in 1761. Temora, an Ancient Epic Poem in Eight Books, together with Several Other Poems was later released in 1763. Even during MacPherson's life, it the authenticity of these works were put into question. MacPherson was never able to produce the original manuscripts to these works.

The second set of readings were taken from Thomas Chatterton. Chatterton was an English poet and forger of pseudo-medieval poetry.Even at a young age, Chatterton was intrigued by the medieval period and began writing works, pretending to be a medieval poet. Chatterton used the pseudonym Thomas Rowley to write his forgeries. He published many works under this guise, but we will only be discussing two of his works in class.

After reading through these forgeries, think about and reflect on the following questions:

Even though it is commonly accepted that Ossian was fabricated, why do you think it remained to be popular and considered important literary work? Why do you think people refused to believe the poems were inauthentic? On that, which parts of the poem seemed to be authentic (if any)? Which parts seem to help support the theory of forgery, and reflect concepts or styles from the 18^th Century?

What aspects of Chatterton's work appear 15th century like? His works were nonetheless uncovered as forgeries though, so what aspects of 18th century literature can be found in his work that might have given this away?

For Credit: "The Bard"

Thomas Gray's The Bard (our reading for Monday, which you can find in the poetry anthology) is a notoriously dense, allusion-rich, and complicated poem.  As with any long later C18 poem, the key to understanding it is figuring out what the basic set-up is: who is speaking, who is being addressed, what the occasion of the address or the issue under discussion is.  Once you've got the basic set-up, you can start tracking the (usually) linear thread of the argument or narrative being presented. 

You don't have to go it alone, though!  We will, of course, talk about the poem in class on Monday, but you can get a head-start here by making some trial attempts at understanding it here.  Respond to this post by either making some initial attempts to figure out what's going on, or correcting, improving, or building upon a classmate's ideas.

Deadline: Monday (4/4), 1pm.

For Credit: Ready, Aim, Fire that Canon! (DEADLINE EXTENDED)

UPDATE (4/2):  After wallowing all this past week in the profoundly revisionist canon, we return on Monday to the world of white upper-class men.  The Bard is one of those canonical poems that has not survived.   One consequence of the end of The Canon is that when it disappeared it took with it the sense that there was a single, linear anglophone literary tradition that the educated person should be familiar with.  So long as readers shared a general knowledge of important key works and events of literary history, the Bard was a fairly accessible poem--it drew on a common body of familiar knowledge.  As readers increasingly have to rely on footnotes to make sense of its dense allusive weave, it ceases to be readable (in the way that say, Collier's poem is).

[The Bard is not the only significant poem to drop out of view in this way and for this reason.  Samuel Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes, for example, remains in the Longman anthology of C18 Lit, but I suspect I am one of the few English instructors in the U.S. who has attempted to teach it.  There are a few egregious typos in the Longman version of the poem that have remained through three different editions.  If the text were widely taught by those who order the anthology, the errors would have been caught and corrected before the most recent edition was published].

The blog responses thus far to the changing canon have discussed what is gained as the canon changes.  What about what gets lost?  Or can we willingly part with The Bard?

Original post:

We spoke in class today (3/30) of "The Canon."

In fact, there are two canons.   "The Canon" consists of the white upper- and middle-class men who have been regarded as significant literary figures, and therefore been widely republished, anthologized and taught throughout the C20.  "The Canon Wars" were fought in literature departments through the 1970s and 1980s in an attempt to expand The Canon to include women, non-white writers, and working-class experience, but they had the effect of exploding the notion of a Canon altogether.  The conflicting views of history, authenticity, literary value, and inclusivity that brought the Canon Wars about made it virtually impossible for scholars to agree on a revised broader list of works that every educated person ought to read.

But the idea of a Canon didn't disappear altogether.  After all, syllabi get written, important literary and cultural topics get taught, textbooks and anthologies get cobbled together to accommodate those needs...and inevitably some works emerge as being more helpful in those processes and others.  The list of texts that turn up fairly consistently in these ways have come to be known as "The Revised Canon."  It it a humbler and much more supple entity than the old Canon, with NO pretensions of being universally used and loved--but it does reflect the state of current college-level teaching.  It is under continuous revision, as particular texts get sufficient scholarly intention to make their way into textbooks, and others cease to be of interest and so get dropped.

The Revisionist Canon does not treat equally all of the authors neglected by the original Canon.  Ann Yearsley and Mary Leapor are considered part of the "Revisionist Canon."  There is either a scholarly biography or a scholarly edition of their works available, they have been the subjects of numerous essays in peer-reviewed journals, and their poems have made their way from specialized anthologies of women's writing to mainstream teaching collections like the Norton and Longman anthologies of C18 Lit.  Robert Dodsley has not fared as well.  There are books about him but he's been treated more as a key figure of cultural history for his printing and bookselling activities with Alexander Pope.  Dodsley's poetry has received little scholarly attention.

Stephen Duck and Mary Collier have seen their literary fortunes exactly reversed.  As the observations in class today might have predicted, Duck rode his literary talents to fame and prosperity, earning a college degree and a patronage appointment under Queen Anne.  Mary Collier remained a washerwoman all her life.  Duck has never quite been forgotten--he remained of interest as a minor literary curiosity throughout the C19 and C20.  Collier had to wait for the feminist scholars of the 1970s to rescue her from literary oblivion.  Since her rediscovery, however, Duck has become largely a footnote to her "Women's Labour."  It is difficult to find a complete edition of his poem (the one available in your poetry anthology is a rare exception), while Collier's poem appears widely.  And no one reads Duck anymore as a significant figure in his own right--to the extent that he gets read, it's to better understand Collier's poem.

One last case in point: Phillis Wheatley.  I don't have to make a point of including her in this course, because she is an author that most of you have already encountered and read elsewhere.  Forty years ago, her name would have meant nothing to you.

So here's the question--a refinement of the attendance question you had today.  What should warrant the inclusion of a working-class writer in the Revisionist Canon?

• His or her class consciousness (and what exactly does that mean in the C18 context)?
• The literary power of his or her work for readers today, independent of the author's class?
• The interesting backstory to the author's life?
• The degree of critical and literary attention the author got in the C18?
• The degree to which the presence of the author helps to sustain a balance of texts depicting a range of C18 life experience?
• ???

Post your thoughts (or respond collegially to a classmate's ideas) here.

Deadline: Monday (4/4), 1pm.

For Credit: A Woman's Labour

As you read Mary Collier's "A Woman's Labour" for tomorrow (and trace her references to Stephen Duck's poem), consider the following questions:

• What was it about Duck's poem that annoyed her so much?
• How is her attitude toward her lot in life similar to or different from that of the other working class writers we discussed on Wednesday?
• What overarching issues, themes, ideas shape her poem as a whole?  (If you have time to look over Duck's poem at greater length, how does she structure her poem differently from his?)
• How does this poem expand your "big picture" of later C18 literature?

Feel free to respond to any of those questions.

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

For Credit: Working-Class Literature Follow-Up

On Wednesday, we looked at the four readings in class and discussed how they fit in to the whole of working-class literature and in the era of literature we've been discussing this semester. Below are two main ideas; feel free to reply to either.

The last point we brought up was that Yearsley and Leapor, the female writers we examined, were aware of the fact that they had little to no chance of social mobility and wrote from that perspective. Dodsley, as a male writer, had a higher chance of being able to move up the social ladder, and we believe that this was reflected in his writing. The category of "working-class writers," then, breaks down into smaller categories, just as the category of "the working class" can be broken down into any number of categories. Do you agree that this gender gap is displayed throughout these works (and the other works we've studied)? Are there other differences between Dodsley's works and the Leapor/Yearsley poems that can be attributed to the genders of the authors?

One final question revolves around the idea of authorship. The replies to our previous blog post have shown that our class has a wide range of opinions on the question of whether an author's background matters. What if, as Kirstin suggested in class, we found Ann Yearsley's poem in an anthology of poetry and had no information about the author? For one, we could no longer definitively relate her claims of feeling unequal to those around her to what we know about her class, but what would this do to the poem? What would our class discussion on the poem (assuming it were part of our syllabus) look like? Would the poem become less valuable, transformed from a work that speaks from the experiences of one working-class woman into a cute treatise on what friendship is?

As our past post suggested, in classroom settings, we don't always look at authorial background. We don't normally examine the love letters John Keats wrote in order to understand a little more about who he is and why he wrote his poems, for example. Part of this is due to the constraints of a classroom schedule, of course, but we tend to analyze the great works of English literature without using the lens of biographical information. Should we? Do we treat the great writers of literary history unfairly by not looking at their backgrounds, or are we doing a disservice to less-notable writers like Yearsley and Leapor a disservice by limiting our interpretations of their works to what we know about their backgrounds?

Any other thoughts on Wednesday's discussion, the works we looked at, or working-class literature in general are also welcome.