ENGL 5059

ENGL 5059: British Literature and Culture After 1800 (Fall 2019)

Anonymous — Thu, 04 Apr 2019 17:03:17 +0000

ENGL 5059: British Literature and Culture After 1800 (Fall 2019) Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 04/04/2019 - 11:03

ENGL 5059-001

The Later Romantics, Jill Heydt-Stevenson

This graduate course will explore a central phenomenon during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: the relationship between literature and the fine arts. In their writings, William Blake, Jane Austen, William Wordsworth, Maria Edgeworth, John Keats, Lord Byron, Thomas Love Peacock, Felicia Hemans and many more authors drew on painting, drawing, and sculpture to imagine and reimagine how to depict their world as well as how to describe what moves them in representations themselves (for example, Keats writes about the Elgin Marbles and Peacock about the ruins of Palmyra). This class will offer the exciting prospect of learning about literature and the fine arts (though no specialized knowledge of art history is necessary). We will explore varying ways that these two fields intersect: does the literature “redeploy” the statue, ruin, or landscape’s intensities and energies? Does the novel or poem’s description displace what is being viewed? How might a representation of a representation (novel describing a painting) change how we see the “original”? Inversely, how might the remaking of a literary scene or character into a physical artifact dislodge that original liveliness into new performances, new meanings? What does it mean to embody words in marble or gold? What are the benefits and limitations of description? Where do the concepts of originality and authenticity figure in when an author depicts the work of a painter, or vice versa. To help frame and answer such questions, we will look at a few essays by Thing Theorists (such as Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter) and other Romantic-era and contemporary philosophers. Our focus, however, will be on the literature. Assignments will probably include a short paper, a long paper, and a presentation.

MA Designation: Literature After 1800, Poetry Intensive, A (Formalisms)

Off

Traditional

White

ENGL 5059-002: British Literature and Culture After 1800, Bloomsbury Group (Spring 2019)

Anonymous — Thu, 04 Oct 2018 19:47:26 +0000

ENGL 5059-002: British Literature and Culture After 1800, Bloomsbury Group (Spring 2019) Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 10/04/2018 - 13:47

Professor Jane Garrity

Course Description: Both celebrated and maligned, the Bloomsbury Group is the best-known English artistic coterie of the twentieth century. This course will examine some of the works of the individuals who made up this charmed circle, such as prose writers Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Vita Sackville West, and Lytton Strachey; artists Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, and Duncan Grant; the economist John Maynard Keynes; and art critics Roger Fry and Clive Bell. The course will focus on Bloomsbury's influence during the interwar period, when the Group's celebrity peaked, but we will also discuss the persistent fascination with the “Bloomsberries” today. Students will hand in weekly responses, lead class discussion, and write a long seminar paper.

MA-Lit Course Designation: Literature After 1800, D (Cultures/Politics/Histories)

Off

Traditional

White

ENGL 5059-001: British Literature and Culture After 1800, Forms of Victorian Poetry (Spring 2019)

Anonymous — Thu, 04 Oct 2018 19:44:24 +0000

ENGL 5059-001: British Literature and Culture After 1800, Forms of Victorian Poetry (Spring 2019) Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 10/04/2018 - 13:44

Professor Emily Harrington

The Victorian period was a time of tremendous poetic experiment. Browning and Tennyson are credited with inventing the dramatic monologue, and innovations in the verse novel and the epic by Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, and William Morris rival the period’s prose novels. At the same time, Victorian poets revitalized standard lyric forms such as the sonnet and the ode, stretching them to their very limits. This period saw what Meredith Martin has called the “prosody wars” in which battles raged over whether England’s poetic and cultural inheritance emerged along classical, implicitly patrician lines or required a newer more flexible set of rules. We will consider the frontlines of these wars, including the hexameter “mania,” speculations about quantitative verse and sprung rhythm. The course will pay special attention to the ways these formal debates and experiments stake cultural claims about the relationships between the mind and the body, the state and the individual, the divine and the earthly. Poets studied will include Tennyson, the Brownings, the Rossettis, Swinburne, Meredith, Mathilde Blind, Augusta Webster, Hopkins, and Hardy. The course will be organized around various forms, so that we can understand many of the poets through a variety of formal lenses. In addition to the readings, assignments will include weekly responses, a presentation, and a conference paper that will be expanded into a seminar paper.

MA-Lit Course Designation: Literature After 1800, Poetry Intensive, A (Formalisms)

Off

Traditional

White

ENGL 5059-001: British Literature and Culture After 1800, Contesting Romantic Poetry, The Lakers vs. the Cockneys

Anonymous — Thu, 16 Aug 2018 20:56:45 +0000

ENGL 5059-001: British Literature and Culture After 1800, Contesting Romantic Poetry, The Lakers vs. the Cockneys Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 08/16/2018 - 14:56

Professor Jeffrey N. Cox

We will be exploring the rich and varied poetry of what has come to be called the romantic period. While over the course of the nineteenth century, critics arrived at some consensus about what romantic poetry was and who the romantic poets were, at the time the nature of poetry was very much up for debate. The writers we now consider the major poets of the period were, with the exception of Byron, not the best selling writers of the era. While the canon of romanticism came to limited to six male poets, at the time many women poets helped shape the landscape of poetry. There was no monolithic notion of Romantic Poetry but instead diverse writers and rival theories of poetry. In order to understand the various ways in which poetry existed in the romantic period, we will focus on the opposition between the so-called Lake School (centrally, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey) and the group labeled the Cockney School (Keats, Shelley, Byron, and Hunt among others). We will also be examining other poets who define the context within which these poets wrote, so we will examine, for example, how Charlotte Smith shaped Wordsworth’s poetry but was never considered part of the same school or how Hemans wrote in competition with and criticism of poets such as Byron and Shelley. Our goal will be to understand some of the great poetry of the period but also grasp the ways in which literature was created and organized within rival communities.

MA-Lit Course Designation: Poetry Intensive, Literature After 1800, A (Formalisms), D (Cultures/Politics/Histories)

Off

Traditional

White