(Section 071)
Nature in Literature
Spring 2012
Jones
T, Th 2:30;3:45
Dumbach 228
In this course (for university core credit) we’ll study the cultural history of the relationship of people and the environment, as represented in a selection of British writing during a crucial period of literary history—the Romantic period of 1789-1832. The focus will be the historical crux of Romantic literature and its representations of consciousness, imagination, art, technology, of human speciation, and the very idea of “Nature” in the modern sense, all of which raise key questions about the historical roots of our own concern with environmental, social, and political justice, for example, as well as questions about the social and “natural” contexts of literary art and representation.
Graded requirements:
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* short (1-2 page) writing assignment 20%
* longer (5-page) paper 35%
* class participation 15%
* midterm exam 15%
* final exam 15%
Required books:
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* Richey and Robinson, eds. New Riverside edition of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads
* Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Broadview edition)
All readings are from these books unless otherwise indicated.
Schedule:
JANUARY
17 Introductions
19 Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads of 1798 (21-22); Coleridge, from Biographia Literaria (416-422)
24 Preface to Lyrical Ballads of 1802 (390); Contemporary Reviews (351-64); “The Friend of Humanity and the Needy Knife Grinder” (311)
26 “Lines Written at a Small Distance from My House” (63), “Lines Written in Early Spring” (72); “Barbara Allen’s Cruelty” (246)
31 Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancyent Mariner” (23-43)
FEBRUARY
2 Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancyent Mariner”; cf. 1817 version (423-444)
7 Coleridge, “The Nightingale: A Conversational Poem” (47), “Fears in Solitude” (223)
9 “Goody Blake and Harry Gill” (59), Smith, “The Dead Beggar” (312)
14 “Simon Lee” (64), “The Thorn” (73)
16 “We Are Seven” (70), “The Last of the Flock” (81), “Anecdote for Fathers” (68)
21 Godwin, “Of Justice” (187-193); Thelwall, “The Old Peasant,” “The Benevolence” (197-201); Burke, “Thoughts … on Scarcity ” (201-204)
23 “Expostulation and Reply” (103), “The Tables Turned” (104), “Old Man Traveling” (105)
28 Hartley, from Observations on Man (129-132); Rousseau, from A Discourse Upon the Origin and Foundation of Inequality (137-140); Coleridge, Sonnet IV (344)
MARCH
1 “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” (110-115); Gardner, “Sonnet” (348) ONE-PAGE PAPER DUE (see prompt below **)
SPRING BREAK MARCH 6, 8
13 Wordsworth, “Sonnet on Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress” (152); Helen Maria Williams, “To Sensibility” (149)
15 MIDTERM EXAM
20 Smith, Sonnets 1, 2, 3, 4, 44 (143, 336, 152)
22 Bürger, “Lenora” (253), “The Lass of Fair Wone” (261)
27 Robinson, “The Haunted Beach” (376)
29 Shelley, Frankenstein
APRIL
3 Shelley, Frankenstein cont’d, and Appendix B (269-282)
5 Gilpin, from Observations on the River Wye (332-336); “Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree” (45-47)
10 Coleridge, “Effusion 23: To the Nightingale” (343), “Frost at Midnight” (233)
12 Coleridge, from Letter to Robert Southey; “Address to a Young Jack-Ass” (214)
17 Coleridge, “Kubla Khan” (online), “To Nature” (online); Southey, “The Sailor” (368)
19 “The Idiot Boy” (88), “The Mad Mother” (85); Southey, “The Idiot” (307)
24 Gary Snyder, “Ripples on the Surface”*
26 TBA FINAL PAPER DUE
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*
“Ripples on the surface of the water—
were silver salmon passing under—different
from the ripples caused by breezes”
A scudding plume on the wave—
a humpback whale is
breaking out in air up
gulping herring
– Nature not a book, but a performance, a
high old culture
Ever-fresh events
scraped out, rubbed out, and used, used, again—
the braided channels of the rivers
hidden under fields of grass—
The vast wild
the house, alone.
The little house in the wild,
the wild in the house.
Both forgotten.
No Nature
Both together, one big empty house.
–Gary Snyder (1992)
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**
One-page paper DUE March 1:
Use Wordle to make a word cloud out of “Tintern Abbey.” Then write a one-page paper–12-pt. double spaced, 1-inch margins, no introduction or conclusion–just the core–explaining 2-3 things you learned from the process that made you look at the poem with fresh eyes. (This assumes that you’ll re-read the poem after seeing the word cloud.)
