English 931: Symposium in Romantic Literature

British Women Poets of the Romantic Period

Fall 2001

Stephen C. Behrendt
319 Andrews; 472-1806
office: 12-2 M and by appointment
sbehrendt1@unl.edu

TEXTS:

British Women Poets of the Romantic Era: An Anthology. Ed. Paula R. Feldman. 1997. We will select other texts from on-line resources (especially the British Women Romantic Poets project at UC, Davis) and from local archives (like UNL's Corvey collection). Plan also to read widely and eclectically in criticism and theory, especially feminist theory and reception theory, and in period criticism and biography.

AIM:

The primary aim of this symposium is for all of us to participate, in hands-on fashion, in the recovery and reassessment of poetry by British Women of the Romantic period, c. 1780-1835. We will study a wide range of writers, using the best available anthology to generate some overall sense of this diverse material and to begin to examine crucial issues of canonicity, periodicity, and aesthetics that emerge when women's poetry is considered both with and against that of their male contemporaries. Everyone will also conduct detailed textual and critical research on a single author and will prepare an edition of one of that poet's works. There will be opportunities to publish these editions and any accompanying critical and textual apparatus in electronic form, either on a website at UNL or in connection with existing ones like CW3 at the Corvey Project (Sheffield Hallam University) or the British Women Romantic Poets site at the University of California, Davis. We will work together as students, scholars, editors, and technologists, 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 probably unsettling to some extent, considering that we will be studying materials that in many cases have gone largely unexamined for well over a century. One thing we will need to teach ourselves, then, is how to evaluate such materials without resorting unthinkingly to the sort of gendered assumptions that have governed literary history during the past century-plus. Another thing we will need to consider is just what it means to edit a text, and what issues govern the recovery and reassessment of neglected texts and the preparation of those texts for a modern audience.

We will also consider issues of pedagogy as they bear upon our subject. How - and why - does one teach these poets and their works? What issues govern everything from the text selection of texts to in-class approaches to the work of teaching? And who decides? What are the appropriate scholarly, intellectual, critical, theoretical, and pedagogical considerations involved in recovering and reassessing (including teaching) historically underrepresented texts and their authors in a twenty-first century academic culture?


SYMPOSIUM REQUIREMENTS:

A preliminary note on Discussion. This is a "given," a prerequisite for any advanced study in the field, whether in this department or elsewhere. As a study group we are, by definition, partners and collaborators. Only if each of you are willing to participate and contribute in this fashion to do so can we achieve our full potential as a study group. For some who may not be entirely comfortable with spontaneous and candid discussion, this requirement may seem difficult. It is, however, a requirement that I set with full awareness of how small graduate courses operate elsewhere. You are implicitly both peers with - and competitors of - those other students, and you will remain so both in the job market and, more important, in the intellectual life to which you have committed yourself in this profession. Practice now, among congenial companions, the skills you will need later on for success - indeed for survival - in the profession.

1. Each of you will present, and lead the discussion over, one poet from the syllabus. When you are not presenting or leading the discussion, I expect each of you to join fully and generously in the group discussions.

2. Each of you will prepare a scholarly edition of another poet, selected from one of the following sources:

Ideally, this edition will be an electronic one, prepared at UNL using on-campus resources including the authoring station in Love Library. My goal is for each of you to mount your electronic edition through the Electronic Text Center at UNL's Love Library. In the event that it proves impossible to prepare an electronic edition, I will expect you to prepare a paper edition.

3. We may decide among ourselves to do brief, informal "position papers" to help us frame up our discussions. Any such position papers will be short and conversational in nature.

 

OTHER NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS:

Because we will be working both as a study group and as a compact of discrete scholars and editors, pursuing both the combined program of our symposium's overall design and the individual editorial and critical projects each of us will undertake, we will all need to budget our time and resources effectively and - perhaps most important of all - to keep one another appraised of how we are doing on each of these tasks. I will set up a discussion list for your convenience in interacting with one another outside our weekly sessions (I will also circulate your phone and email contacts). I will also do whatever I can to assist you with your individual projects, and I will serve as a liaison with the appropriate resource people at Love Library (and elsewhere) with whom you will work over the course of this semester, and beyond. Please keep me posted, therefore, on the evolving design and progress of your work and on anything you may need from me as you proceed.