English 7770: Seminar in English Literature Self-Reflexivity in Romantic Poetry Prof. Andrew Franta Fall 2017, TH 12:25-1:45, LNCO 3870 Office: LNCO 3621; Phone: 581-7850 Office hours: TH 2:00-3:30

Description: This course will examine forms of self-reflexivity in English romantic poetry. Our aim will be twofold: first, to consider the constitutive role of irony in a poetic tradition often thought to be defined by sincerity; second, to explore the critical resources available for the interpretation of romantic poetry in light of the field’s ongoing vacillation between formalist and historicist approaches. In addition, we will take up questions about the relationship between lyric and narrative poetry, voice and persona, and the political efficacy of the poetic text. Readings will include poetry and prose by William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charlotte Smith, and William Wordsworth.

Requirements: Over the course of the term, students will write two short papers (5-6 pages), which will be presented in class and will frame the day’s discussion. One of these short papers will serve as the starting point for a seminar paper of 10-15 pages (for MA students) or 15-20 pages (for PhD students).

Course policies: This course will be conducted as a seminar. Its success depends on the active participation of all of its members. Attendance, preparation, and participation are expected and will constitute an important part of the course grade. Absences will negatively affect your grade for the course.

Texts: William Blake, Blake’s Poetry and Designs (Norton) 978-0393924985 S.T. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Major Works (Oxford) 978-0199537914 John Keats, Complete Poems (Harvard) 978-0674154315 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose (Norton) 978-0393977523 Charlotte Smith, Charlotte Smith: Major Poetic Works (Broadview) 978-1554812844 William Wordsworth, William Wordsworth: The Major Works (Oxford) 978-0199536863

Secondary readings are available on Canvas or online.

Schedule (subject to revision):

Wk. 1 (8/22, 24) Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” Brooks, “Keats’s Sylvan Historian: History Without Footnotes”

Wk. 2 (8/29, 31) Wordsworth, “A slumber did my spirit seal” Brooks, “Irony as a Principle of Structure” De Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality”

Wk. 3 (9/5, 7) Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Makdisi, “The Political Aesthetic of Blake’s Images”

Wk. 4 (9/12, 14) Wordsworth, “The Old Cumberland Beggar,” “Lines Written at a Small Distance from My House,” “Goody Blake and Harry Gill,” “The Thorn,” “The Idiot Boy,” “Lines written in Early Spring,” “Anecdote for Fathers” Note to “The Thorn” Jager, “The Entangled Spirituality of ‘The Thorn’”

Wk. 5 (9/19, 21) Wordsworth, “We Are Seven,” “Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman,” “Expostulation and Reply,” “The Tables Turned,” “Tintern Abbey,” “Resolution and Independence,” Preface to Lyrical Ballads Ferguson, “Historicism, Deconstruction, and Wordsworth”

Wk. 6 (9/26, 28) Coleridge, “The Eolian Harp,” “Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement,” “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Frost at Midnight,” “Fears in Solitude,” “The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem” Canuel, “The Reparative Impulse”

Wk. 7 (10/3, 5) Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Chs. 1-4, 13-14, 17 TBD

FALL BREAK – Oct. 8-15

Wk. 8 (10/17, NO CLASS 10/19) Smith, Elegiac Sonnets Pinch, “Sentimentality and Experience in Charlotte Smith’s Sonnets”

Wk. 9 (10/24, 26) Smith, “Beachy Head” Goodman, “Conjectures on Beachy Head: Charlotte Smith’s Geological Poetics and the Grounds of the Present”

Wk. 10 (10/31, 11/2) Shelley, “Alastor,” “Mont Blanc” Ferguson, “Shelley’s Mont Blanc: What the Mountain Said”

Wk. 11 (11/7, 9) Shelley, “The Sensitive-Plant,” “Ode to Heaven,” “Ode to the West Wind,” “The Cloud,” “To a Sky-Lark,” “Ode to Liberty,” A Defence of Poetry Chandler, “History’s Lyre: The ‘West Wind’ and the Poet’s Work”

Wk. 12 (11/14, 16) Shelley, “The Triumph of Life” De Man, “Shelley Disfigured”

Wk. 13 (11/21) Keats, “Isabella; or The Pot of Basil,” “The Eve of St. Agnes” Knapp, “Negative Capability”

THANKSGIVING BREAK – Nov. 23-26

Wk. 14 (11/28, 30) Keats, “Hyperion: A Fragment,” “Lamia,” “The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream” Gigante, “The Monster in the Rainbow: Keats and the Science of Life”

Wk. 15 (12/5, 7) Paper conferences

Seminar paper due 12/18 Secondary readings:

Brooks, Cleanth. “Keats’s Sylvan Historian: History Without Footnotes.” The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. 1947. New York: Harcourt, 1974. 151-66. [Canvas]

---. “Irony as a Principle of Structure.” Literary Opinion in America. Ed. Morton Dauwen Zabel. Rev. ed. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1951. 729-41. [Canvas]

Canuel, Mark. “The Reparative Impulse.” Justice, Dissent, and the Sublime. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2012. 63-93. [Canvas]

Chandler, James. “History’s Lyre: The ‘West Wind’ and the Poet’s Work.” Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. 711-21.

De Man, Paul. “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” 1969. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. 2nd ed., rev. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983. 187-228. [Canvas]

---. “Shelley Disfigured.” The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. 93-123, 299-301. [Canvas]

Ferguson, Frances. “Historicism, Deconstruction, and Wordsworth.” Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation. New York: Routledge, 1992, 146-71. [Canvas]

---. “Shelley’s Mont Blanc: What the Mountain Said.” Romanticism and Language. Ed. Arden Reed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 202-14. [Canvas]

Goodman, Kevis. “Conjectures on Beachy Head: Charlotte Smith’s Geological Poetics and the Grounds of the Present.” ELH 81:3 (2014): 983-1006. [Project MUSE]

Gigante, Denise. “The Monster in the Rainbow: Keats and the Science of Life.” PMLA 117:3 (2002): 433-48. [JSTOR]

Jager, Colin. “The Entangled Spirituality of ‘The Thorn.’” British Romanticism: Criticism and Debates. Ed. Mark Canuel. London: Routledge, 2015. 464-72. [Canvas]

Knapp, Steven. “Negative Capability.” Literary Interest: The Limits of Anti-Formalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. 30-48. [Canvas]

Makdisi, Saree. “The Political Aesthetic of Blake’s Images.” The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Ed. Morris Eaves. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003. 110- 32. [Canvas] Pinch, Adela. “Sentimentality and Experience in Charlotte Smith’s Sonnets.” Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996. 51-71. [Canvas]