English 331:     

British Women Poets of theRomantic Period

Stephen Behrendt
319 Andrews; 472-1806
office: 2:00 - 3:30 TR, 10:00 - 12:00 W
and by appointment
email Dr. Behrendt

Required Texts:

British Women Poets of the Romantic Era. Ed. Paula R. Feldman
Additional texts from UNL’s excellent on-line resources and/or available on Canvas

Course Information:

AIM AND DESCRIPTION:

We’ll read widely among these fascinating poets, and we’ll examine their subjects, themes, and styles as part of the dramatic ongoing reassessment of “British Romantic Poetry” that has been fueled by the recovery of historically neglected or marginalized women poets. That project is probably the most important development in British literary history in the last quarter century. In this course we’ll begin to see why that is so.

We’ll read these poets “in their own right,” separate and distinct from their male contemporaries, but we will also do some comparing and contrasting. Along the way, we’ll also consider how “literary history” has been – and continues to be – written, and at what cost to the many writers whose lives, works, and voices have historically been silenced. And we’ll explore how and why that is changing — at last.

We’ll survey this remarkably diverse material and consider crucial issues of canonicity, periodicity, and aesthetics that emerge when women’s poetry is considered both with and against that of their male contemporaries. We will work together as a community of students and scholars, doing work that is very much at the leading edge of contemporary Romantics studies.

TEACHING METHOD:

This will be a symposium in the true sense of the word. We will work as colleagues in a study group, pooling our efforts, our experiences, and our energies to contribute – both individually and collectively – to remapping the Romantic literary landscape. Our sessions will be conversational in nature, collaborative in function, and perhaps unsettling, since we will be studying materials that in many cases have gone largely unexamined for well over a century. We will try to teach ourselves how to evaluate this poetry without resorting unthinkingly to gendered assumptions that have long governed literary history. In the process, we’ll consider what issues govern recovering and reassessing neglected texts and preparing them for a modern audience.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS AND GRADE WEIGHTS:

1. Consistent, engaged attendance.
2. Engaged participation in classroom discussions and group activities. In a small class like ours, discussion and other interactions are unusually important.
3. Daily Index Cards containing comments on the day’s assigned reading. These will count for 15% of your course grade
4. A Midterm Examination, in the form of an essay you will write outside class time. You will have about a week to prepare your essay, on a topic I will provide. This examination counts for 25% of your course grade.
5. A Final Examination. We will negotiate the subject(s) and format of this examination, which counts for 20% of your course grade.
6. A substantial Research Project in the form of an “Adopt-A-Poet” project (described on a separate handout) that will be mounted on a website accessible to scholars, students, and general readers worldwide. This project, for which you will receive copyright credit, will count for 40% of your course grade.

A Note on Class Participation:

In keeping with the letter and the spirit of the ACE requirement, I consider your participation in our group work to be a vital part of this course, especially since the small size of this course is specifically intended to facilitate discussion. You can expect your final course grade to reflect the extent to which you have made consistent, helpful, and thoughtful contributions to our work.

Electronics environment policy:

Because some of our materials are available on Canvas and elsewhere on line, you are free to use laptops, tablets and other electronic devices as part of our classroom work. Please have the decency and courtesy, though, NOT to abuse this privilege by working your email, playing electronic games, or otherwise “dropping out” of classroom activities. I will deduct attendance credit from those who violate this rule.

What You Can Expect to Do in This Course:

The Department of English has articulated its expectations about what sort of skills, activities, and experiences students should expect to gain or sharpen in courses at various levels of the curriculum. For courses at the 300 level (like this one), you should expect to do the following:
– engage in an intensive study of the subject matter of later 18th- and early19th-Century British literature, in both broadly inclusive terms and in more narrowly focused ones;
– be aware that there are a variety of theoretical and critical approaches to the materials we will study and be able to apply at least one of these approaches to our work;
– understand the purposes of primary and secondary research and be able to carry out research appropriate to the subject of this course;
– engage in critical academic discourse, both in the classroom and on paper, employing language and forms of discourse suitable to the assigned task and to an audience of educated adults

About What I Expect from You:

While I do not expect you to be familiar with any of our material in advance, I do expect you to know how to read literary works with some insight and sophistication about both subject matter and the formal features of the genres. I expect you to come to class, to talk about what you read, and to share with one another as we try to make greater sense of the material we will study over the course of the semester. This will require some effort from everyone. It is generally assumed that preparing for one’s university courses requires – at minimum – about three hours for every hour of class meeting time. That is probably about accurate for this course; if you cannot or will not make that sort of time commitment for preparing for classes, you may want to think about whether you should remain in the group.

Disclaimer Section:

Achievement Centered Education

By passing this course, you will fulfill ACE Learning Outcome 5: “Use knowledge, historical perspectives, analysis, interpretation, critical evaluation, and the standards of evidence appropriate to the humanities to address problems and issues.” Your work will be evaluated by the instructor according to the specifications described in this syllabus. At the end of the term, you may be asked to provide samples of your work for ACE assessment as well.

Opportunities to achieve this outcome:

You will read, learn about, and discuss a variety of texts by important later eighteenth and early nineteenth century British and Continental authors. We will put each reading into historical and cultural context, through mini-lectures and classroom discussion. You will get practice in interpreting literature from the perspective of history as well as from the perspective of literary form and technique. You will explore and challenge various interpretations of literary and historical meaning through close reading and other forms of literary analysis and through the application of historical evidence, and you will learn how to understand individual texts within the context of literary and historical movements, such as Enlightenment, Jacobinism and Romanticism.

Opportunities to demonstrate achievement of this outcome:

Assignments will offer you a range of opportunities to apply historical knowledge and literary analysis to problems and issues relevant to the literary texts we study. You will apply literary and historical interpretation to make critical evaluations of various text. I will design essay assignments to require both close reading practices and larger cultural/historical analyses of literary texts. Essay examinations (like the midterm) will require you to apply the historical knowledge and practices of literary interpretation you have learned by analyzing the significance of texts you have read, comparing them across authors and periods, and assessing their cultural and humanistic importance by applying textual and other evidence and crafting rhetorically effective arguments.

Department of English Policy on Class Attendance:

“The Department of English expects students registered for English classes to attend all scheduled class meetings and to have a reasonable excuse for any absence. Instructors are expected to lower the grades of students who miss classes without reasonable excuses and to penalize any work turned in late because of such absences. Students who miss more than twenty percent of the scheduled class meetings of any course will ordinarily fail the course for that reason alone, except that (1) if absences occur before the Withdrawal Passing period ends, the student may receive a “W” grade, and (2) if the absences are excused by the instructor or approved UNL policy and a large majority of them occur after the work of the course has been substantially completed, the student may receive an Incomplete (“I”) grade. In both of these cases, it is assumed that the student meets the eligibility requirement stated in the Schedule of Classes. Members of the teaching staff may have more restrictive attendance policies than are here stated.”

I support this policy completely. Especially in a class like this one, our collective in-class work is an absolutely vital part of the overall course. Because of its interactive and unscripted nature, the in-class work cannot be “made up,” and if you choose to “blow off” the class attendance requirement, you will fail the course.

Plagiarism and Academic Misconduct:

In any writing that you do for this course (and for every other course you are taking), you must cite the source for any and all writing that you have taken from “outside” sources like books, published essays, articles, and book chapters; newspapers and other periodicals; and any online or other digital sources, including video and audio files. This requirement applies both to direct quotations (which you should indicate by using quotation marks) and indirect references, paraphrases, or summaries. Any time you use material that is not your own, whether quoted directly or paraphrased or summarized, and you fail to cite the source from which you’ve taken it, you are plagiarizing. You should also cite primary sources (like the texts of poems you write about) such as textbooks, handouts, and online sources.

Understanding plagiarism:

Properly acknowledging the work of others is part of the process of generating new knowledge through honest effort, and doing so will earn you the respect and esteem of your professors, colleagues and professional peers.

As students and scholars, we are constantly engaging with other people's ideas: we read them in texts, hear them in lecture, discuss them in class and encounter them on the web. Inevitably, we are influenced by the ideas of others and incorporate them into our own thinking and writing. To facilitate the free and honest exchange of ideas among scholars, we are expected give credit to those from whom we borrow words, images or ideas.

In simplest terms, writers must distinguish their own words from the words of others by placing the words of others within quotation marks, and by giving appropriate citations to the sources of quoted text. Neglecting to do so is plagiarism: stealing the words, images or ideas of others without clearly acknowledging the source of that information. It is academic shoplifting, in other words, and it is patently dishonest and disrespectful.

The prohibition of plagiarism is not unique to educational institutions. If the expression of an idea is recorded in any way or fixed in some medium — such as a piece of writing, drawing, photograph, painting, or web page — it is considered intellectual property and is protected by U.S. Copyright Law. To plagiarize is to steal the property of someone else; it is actually a blatant infringement of the law and can be legally punishable. Think of how businesses (and universities) protect their products, names, slogans, and logos from use by unauthorized persons or companies. It’s the same issue.

Plagiarism in any form, however minor, is a violation of the UNL Student Code of Conduct, section B.1.1c, which defines plagiarism as: “Presenting the work of another as one's own (i.e., without proper acknowledgment of the source) and submitting examinations, theses, reports, speeches, drawings, laboratory notes or other academic work in whole or in part as one's own when such work has been prepared by another person or copied from another person.” If you are discovered to have plagiarized, you will normally fail the assignment; instructors are, however, permitted to fail students who plagiarize for the entire course and they are strongly encouraged by the administration to report all violations of the plagiarism policy to the office of Student Judicial Affairs.

If you have questions about the proper way to cite someone else’s words or ideas in your own writing, ask me or contact an adviser in the Writing Assistance Center, 115 Andrews Hall, 402-472-8803.

Questions, Problems, Issues, etc.

If at any time you have questions about the course, my expectations, or your performance – as well as about anything else that may be relevant to our work as a class and/or your own individual work, goals, plans, or whatever – please feel free to speak with me privately. I will hold regular office hours at the announced times, but I am on campus most days until mid-afternoon and so we can generally arrange appointments at other mutually convenient times.

Students with Disabilities:

Services for Students with Disabilities (SSD), located at 132 Canfield Administration Building, provides individualized academic support for students with documented disabilities. Support services can include extended test time, textbooks and handouts in alternative formats (electronic texts, Braille, taped texts, etc), classroom notes, sign language interpreters, and transcriptionists. SSD not only accommodates students that have visible disabilities, but students with other varying types of disabilities that impact college life. If you have a documented disability that is impacting your academic progress, please contact SSD at 402-472-3787 (or 402-472-0053 [TTY], or 402-472-0080 [FAX]) and schedule an appointment. If you do not have a documented disability but you are having difficulties with your coursework (such as receiving low grades even though you study more than your classmates or find you run out of time for test questions when the majority of your peers finish their exams in the allotted time), you may schedule an appointment to discuss the challenges you are experiencing.
I encourage any student with disabilities to contact SSD for a confidential discussion of her or his individual needs for academic accommodation. I will also be happy to chat confidentially with anyone about how to take advantage of SSD’s services. It is the policy of the University of Nebraska - Lincoln to provide flexible and individualized accommodation to students with documented disabilities that may affect their ability to fully participate in course activities or to meet course requirements. To receive accommodation services, students must be registered with the services for students with Disabilities (SSD) office, 132 Canfield Administration Building (see contact numbers above).