English 331: English Authors after 1800
Blake and Romanticism
Stephen C. Behrendt
319 Andrews; 472-1806
office: 11-12 and 2-3 TR
and by appointment
email Dr. Behrendt
Required Texts:
Blake's Poetry and Designs, 2nd edition, ed. Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant
Martin Myrone, The Blake Book
Recommended Optional Text:
William Blake: The Complete Illuminated Books, ed. David Bindman
Objectives of This Course:
William Blake (1757-1827) is famous as both a poet and a visual artist. He developed a type of illustrated poetry he called “illuminated poetry,” in which virtually every page includes both words and visual images. Meanwhile, during Blake’s lifetime the western world changed irreversibly as a consequence of three great revolutions : the Industrial, the American, and the French. Blake’s poetry and visual art records his responses to these changes and his vision of the complex relationships among individuals, humanity, history, God, and the arts. Blake’s poetry is more than just “The Tiger” and “The Lamb,” which are his most famous works: he also composed longer and more difficult works that have fascinated and challenged readers for two centuries. In addition, he produced hundreds of exclusively visual works, including paintings, engravings, and illustrations to other authors’ works. Blake’s verbal and visual works are in dialogue with both literary texts and visual works of art from his period, including both the “fine” (or “higher”) arts and “popular” arts like caricature prints and street entertainments; consequently they represent important commentary on not just his own life and times but also those of his fellow British citizens.
Our plates will therefore be very full this semester. We will study Blake’s illuminated poetry and his visual art to better understand Blake’s unique and ultimately optimistic prophetic vision of humanity and the modern world as they were beginning to emerge in the wake of the three great eighteenth-century revolutions and the protean movement of Romanticism that emerged toward the end of the eighteenth century and significantly defined the “modern” period that has followed. In the process, we will explore both the life and times of this remarkable artist and writer. We will try to arrive – through individual study, group work, discussion, and self-paced on-line work – at a greater appreciation of the particular challenges – and rewards – posed by Blake’s complex interdisciplinary art. We will necessarily explore both the nature and the methodologies of scholarly inquiry into interdisciplinary art and into the particular aesthetic, critical, and theoretical problems inherent in works of art – like Blake’s that involve complex relationships among multiple media as well as among author, audience, texts, and textuality. In the process, we will consider the applicability of both traditional and technologically-enhanced study tools and approaches to this sort of art.
Teaching Method and Course Procedures:
We will make extensive use of computer (and therefore online) technology, including especially The Blake Archive, which houses digital versions of many of Blake’s illuminated poetic works as well as his engravings, watercolors, and paintings. We will also study Blake’s illuminated poetry and his visual art in conventional print formats, illustrated and otherwise. Because every colored copy of Blake’s poems is unique and different from other copies, working with The Blake Archive will allow us to study different versions side by side, as well as enable us to access relevant on-line supplementary materials. In addition, we will explore other visual and verbal works of Blake’s time, including especially caricatures by artists like Thomas Rowlandson, James Gillray, and others.
We will do much of our work in study groups, with only the basest minimum of lecture to provide essential background (or technological) information. In addition, everyone will be able to access a variety of on-line materials for study outside the classroom.
Course Requirements:
Your course grade will be based on the following components, in these weighted percentages:
• Consistent attendance and discussion 15%
NOTE: More than three absences will lower your course grade.
• Participation in group work (including presentations) 15%
• A research project arising from the subject matter of the course 25%.
• Two exams, a midterm (20%) and a final (25%).
What You Can Expect to Do in This Course:
The Department of English has recently 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 19th-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.
Attendance:
I expect you to attend class sessions and to participate in all discussions and other classroom activities, including group projects and presentations. If you miss more than three class meetings, your grade will be lowered and will continue to fall for additional missed sessions.
This Course Satisfies ACE 5:
The following official language is required to appear on this syllabus.
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:
Students will read, learn about, and discuss a range of texts (novels, short stories, poetry, drama, and essays) by major authors in British literature from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Not a survey, ENGL 331 offers either the investigation of a theme or genre (e.g., “Science and Literature”; “The Mystery and Gothic Tradition”) or of texts by two or three major authors in this period (e.g., “Austen, Brontë, and Eliot”; “Dickens and D.H. Lawrence”). Each reading will be put in historical and cultural context, through lectures and discussion, and students will practice literary interpretation from the perspective of history and biography as well as from the perspective of literary form and technique. Students will assimilate, 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. Students will learn how to understand individual texts within the context of literary and historical movements, such as Modernism or the Decadent Movement, and within the context different themes and genres.
Opportunities to demonstrate achievement of this outcome:Assignments will provide a range of opportunities for students to apply historical knowledge and literary analysis to problems and issues relevant to the literary texts we study. Quizzes will assess reading comprehension. The multiple paper assignments are designed to require both close reading practices and larger cultural/historical analyses of literary texts. For the essay examinations, students will apply their historical knowledge and learned skills of literary interpretation to analyze the significance of the texts they have read, to compare them across authors and periods, and to assess their cultural and humanistic importance, applying the evidence they have learned and crafting arguments to suit their rhetorical designs.
Policy on Plagiarism:
Plagiarism is the unacknowledged use of the work of others as if it were your own work. This includes both direct quotations and all close paraphrases of scholarly or other materials, whether in conventional print (books, journals, newspapers, etc.) or from online sources like the Internet and/or other digital sources. The Student Code of Conduct states that anyone guilty of academic dishonesty in the form of plagiarism should automatically receive a failing grade on the assignment, and that the instructor has the option of failing the student for the entire course. I take this issue very seriously indeed; plagiarism is academic shoplifting, and like any other form of shoplifting (taking without paying) it is – and deserves to be – punishable in meaningful ways.
Additional Considerations:
I will try to be as fully available to you as my teaching and other commitments permit me to be. Please feel free to come chat with me about any aspect of the course: about any problems you may be having, insights you have gained, enthusiasms you have developed – whatever. I will keep my announced office hours unless something arises unexpectedly, in which case I (or someone else) will post an explanatory note. Because I am on campus a good deal, it is usually possible to arrange alternative times to chat.
Students with Disabilities:
Services for Students with Disabilities (SSD) 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 call SSD at 472-3787 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.