English 487:
English Capstone Course

The Gothic

Fall 2005

Stephen C. Behrendt
319 Andrews Hall
Fall 2005 Phone: 472-1806
office hours: 2-3 T, 2-4 R
and by appointment

Required Readings

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of The Sublime and Beautiful
           complete text on-line at this link
Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto  (in Three Gothic Novels)
William Beckford, Vathek  (in Three Gothic Novels)
Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho
Charlotte Dacre, Zofloya
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein  (in Three Gothic Novels)
The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, ed. Chris Baldick

Aims and Procedures of This Course

English 487 is intended to be the culminating experience in your overall study within the English major. The course draws upon the broad and diverse range of intellectual experiences you have had in your coursework both in and outside of the Department of English. It offers you an opportunity to explore a relatively focused subject from a variety of perspectives that reflect both your individual experiences and your collective experiences as college students and English majors. I am assuming that you bring to this course many different areas of interest and expertise, from traditional literary studies to studies in alternative literatures and cultures, from studies in composition and rhetoric to creative writing, from film studies to studies in theory. In other words, as we begin this semester we are not already a narrowly specialized cohort of scholars, but rather a broadly diverse constellation of individuals whose interests reflect the remarkable – and, for many, the unsettling – diversity of contemporary English studies.

At the same time, this section of English 487 shares with other sections the goal of having you work with an interdisciplinary subject area – in this case, the Gothic – in order to produce both a formal end product and a cumulative creative intellectual process that reflects your personal and professional engagement with that subject area. During this semester we will read, think, and talk about "the Gothic" in terms of its origins in the history, culture, and climate of the later eighteenth century, its development over the first fifty years or so of its existence, and its evolution and persistence within culture up to the present. Our readings and associated activities are grounded in these early years; however, we will use these readings as starting points for discussions of broader literary, aesthetic, historical, political, scientific, cultural, and ideological phenomena that both affected and were reflected in a variety of artifacts that we associate with the etymologically fuzzy term "Gothic."

Each of you will develop an individual course project relating to the general subject of "the Gothic." This project may be a conventional one (perhaps a "paper" of the sort you write for conventional literary-historical courses) or it may take an alternative form (a "creative" work, an electronic or cinematic project, or something else). I will ask you to involve me in formulating your project topic, and I will ask you to present your project to the class in some form, both as you are working on it and during the final weeks of the semester.

A final note, on numbers and their consequences. At a formal meeting last spring, the faculty of the Department of English agreed that this course should be modeled along the lines of a seminar, with a course enrollment appropriate to an undergraduate seminar – we all took this to be about 15 to 18 students. As you will see when you look around the room, apparently this message failed to register with the Powers That Be who control course enrollments. As a result, and given our numbers, we cannot realistically hope to function as a typical seminar at all. I have therefore entirely revised what I wished us to do in this course, and how I wished us to do it, to try to make the course as productive as possible under these circumstances for all of us. We shall therefore need to depend upon one another even more to engage in the extended conversation that I envision for this course. Think of the course as a "symposium," perhaps in the sense in which we encounter it in Plato's writings.

Grading

Here is where I intend to treat this course as a seminar/symposium. Seminars and symposia are by nature conversational in nature; they depend for their success upon consistent engagement by all members of the group, and upon the full meaning of the expression: "a learning community." If everyone takes on responsibility for keeping the conversation moving, we are likely to have a delightful semester; if people choose not to do so, we are likely to become increasingly miserable (and probably bloodthirsty) and we will learn at first hand the true horrors of Gothic torment.

Your grade will rest entirely upon the nature and quality of your contributions as a participant in a symposium environment. Specifically, I shall base your grade on the following factors:

• Discussion. This needs to be regular and voluntary. At first I will be willing to "call on" people to get the discussion flowing, but I will not do this for very long: it will become clear pretty quickly who are the contributors and who are the sponges. Remember that sponges grow on the bottom of the sea, and that they feed there; not surprisingly, therefore, academic sponges get the lowest grades – the very bottom. Don't be a sponge.
  
  
• Course Project. This is described briefly above, in the first section. I will give you a separate handout about the project, with more specific details. But as in any seminar, this will be a major project that you will develop independently, based on your individual interests, expertise, objectives, and abilities. I encourage you to use this project as an opportunity to "stretch," creatively and intellectually. Take on something different, something challenging that really intrigues you, and let me help you (as necessary) decide how to proceed to make the project most profitable and enjoyable for you.
  
  
• The Intangibles. This has to do with your general "citizenship" among the group: attitude, attendance, collegiality, contributions to our work as a group, etc. This part of the grade can be the difference between a B+ and a A, for instance, (or between a B and a C, seen from the other direction) and it will "count" in any event when I have to work out final grades.
  

Grading in a seminar/symposium is always tricky – for you and for me – because there are no formal "tests" and very little that gets evaluated in purely quantitative ways. It is very much a matter of a "whole package." But you all have sat in classes in which you knew very well who were the contributors and who were the slackers, who were the cheerful souls and who were the sullen ones, who was making the class joyful and who was making it hell. And you have probably speculated about who was likely to get what grade. Yes? So have I. . .

You need to know that in grading your work in this course I will not use the standard academic model in which each of you starts with 100 points, from which I am supposed to deduct points for your every misstep, every mistake, every incautious word, every sin, every drop of Mountain Dew you spill on the carpet. Rather, each of you starts with a blank slate; your job is to earn points; it is not my job to take away points. You may earn as good (or as bad) a grade as you can earn. Financial counselors like to tell us that we must start early to save effectively and build a comfortable nest egg; the same principle applies in this course. Start early. Make it a habit to participate; be a player, not an observer. Remember, your grade is a matter of earning the "quality points" that go into a good grade.