Dr. David L. Clark / English and Cultural Studies 3WE3E Updated 8 January 2018 Department of English and Cultural Studies McMaster University

English and Cultural Studies 3WE3E (Winter 2018)

British Romantic Literature and Culture: Revolution, War, Empire

Los Howl’d from The First Book of Urizen, by William Blake (1795)

Instructor: Dr. David L. Clark

E-mail: [email protected] Office Hours: CNH 210, Friday 12:30 pm-1:30 pm.

T.A. Ms. Stephanie Edwards E-mail: [email protected] Office Hours: CNH 203, Thursday, 5:30 pm-6:30 pm.

Class time: Thursday, 7:00-10:00 pm Classroom: CNH 106 Dr. David L. Clark / English and Cultural Studies 3WE3E !2

Brief Course Description:

Arguably no moment in cultural and literary history is more momentous, complex, and consequential than the period that we now know as “Romanticism,” i.e., the tumultuous efflorescence of literature, politics, science, and culture that begins with the French Revolution in 1789 and more or less subsides when the forces of reaction and conservatism reassert themselves in decade following the world-shaking violence of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792-1815). Romanticism is a period that sees the emergence of modern forms of a wide range of elemental cultural phenomena that are familiar to us today. These include the invention of finance capitalism and the nation-state, as well as the birth of the bourgeoisie, mass consumption, the addict, the insurgent, the unconscious, and the public sphere. It is the period that sees the emergence of total war, war whose object is not only victory on the battlefield but also the outright extermination of the enemy. Not unlike our own times, it is an age of burgeoning global Empire and piercing critiques of Empire. It is also the period that bears witness to the full integration of slavery into the British economy and the emergence of robust political resistance to the traffic in human beings. Feminism and animal rights, as well as experimental science and the modern university, as we understand these terms today, also find their genesis in the Romantic period. During the last half of the eighteenth century, philosophers like Immanuel Kant make bold claims for the centrality of the faculty of reason, while artists of the sort that we study in this course make an analogously strong case for the significance of combining reason with imagination, emotion, and affect in an attempt to do justice to individuals and communities. Romanticism also marks a period of intense interest in both the powers and the limits of language, figures, media, and representation, coupled with a complex self-consciousness about the role of the imagination and creativity in transforming human life. It is perhaps the first moment in literary history in which the psyche is acknowledged as possessing obscure depths worthy of worry and detailed exploration. Experimentation and self-revision are the order of the day, even and especially in the midst of an increasingly conservative social and political setting. Romanticism is an historical conjuncture that brims with surprises, some remarkable and affirming, others horrible and deleterious. It is a moment in cultural history that is characterized by literary practices that are as volatile and complicated as the society in which they are born and which they address--often in sharply dissenting ways.

The objective of this course is to provide students with a good working knowledge of British Romanticism through an analysis of a selection of representative texts by men and women of the period. These texts include: poems, paintings, political pamphlets, autobiographies, and novels. Authors assigned in the course include: Felicia Hemans, Mary Shelley, Thomas Clarkson, Ottobah Cugoano, William Blake, John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Jane Austen, Thomas de Quincey, and William Wordsworth.

Students are reminded that because this class meets but once a week, missing a class is equivalent to missing an entire week’s worth of classes. We have but twelve working classes, so missing even two classes will make thriving in the course much more difficult. So it is important to do everything that you can to attend class and to make arrangements to attend the entire class each time its meets. Some of you may be holding down jobs or have roles as parents and care-givers that may well take you away from class. That’s perfectly understandable. But do make a concerted effort then to obtain good lecture notes from classmates if you miss classes. In the past, students have created self-administered social media forums to facilitate note-sharing as well as discussions about the course.

It’s important to bring the assigned materials to class since I will refer directly to their fine-grained details and discuss those details. That means printing off the assigned poems (for links to those poems, see the relevant links below under the heading “Links for Assigned Poems”) and bringing them those pages to class, as well as purchasing the assigned texts by Shelley, Clarkson and Cugoano, Austen, and De Quincey. In order to bring the total cost of the assigned texts down, Broadview Press has bundled those texts together. Dr. David L. Clark / English and Cultural Studies 3WE3E !3 Required Texts:

Selected poems by Barbauld, Blake, Coleridge, Hemans, Keats, and Wordsworth are available using links provided under the heading “Links for Assigned Poems.” To enable the links (i.e., make them live), click on the Course Outline in Avenue, then click the download arrow at the bottom right of the screen. The links will be live in the downloaded version of the Course Outline.

Austen, Jane. Persuasion. Ed. Linda Bree. Broadview, 1998. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus. Ed. D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf. 2nd Ed. Broadview, 1999. Clarkson, Thomas and Ottobah Cugoano. Essays on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species. Ed. Mary-Antoinette Smith. Broadview, 2010. Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Ed. Joel Faflak. Broadview, 2009.

The William Blake Archive (Selections). http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/main.html

Course Assignments and Weighting:

Midterm examination: 20% Essay (10 pages / 2500 words): 45% Final Examination: 35%

Essay Due Date and Late Submission Policy:

There is one essay in this course. There are two due dates for that essay:

--at start of class, 22 March 2018; or in class, at start of class, 5 April 2018.

You choose which due date suits your needs best. Essays submitted by the first due date will receive a full marking commentary. Essays handed in by the second due date will be graded exactly the same but without comment. No essays will be accepted after the start of the last class of the term. A grade of zero/F will therefore be assigned to essays not submitted by the 5 April 2018 due date.

Since the essay is weighted heavily in this course, students are encouraged not to leave working on this assignment until late in the term. Suggested essay topics will be posted on Avenue. You are strongly encouraged to discuss and develop your essay topic with either Dr. Clark or the course T.A., Stephanie Edwards.

If you are a smoker, please ensure that you print your essay in a smoke-free environment.

Provisional Lecture Schedule

Jan 4 Prefatory Remarks 11 William Blake 18 William Blake + William Wordsworth 25 William Wordsworth + Felicia Hemans Feb 1 Samuel Taylor Coleridge 8 Jane Austen, Persuasion 15 Jane Austen, Persuasion + Anna Laetitia Barbauld 22 Reading Week Dr. David L. Clark / English and Cultural Studies 3WE3E !4 March 1 Midterm Examination 8 John Keats 15 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein 22 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein [First due date for essay. See instructions above.] 29 De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater 29 De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater + Thomas Clarkson and Ottobah Cugoano April 5 Thomas Clarkson and Ottobah Cugoano, Essays on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species [Last day to submit essay.]

Links for Assigned Poems

To enable the links (i.e., make them live), click on the Course Outline in Avenue, then click the download arrow at the bottom right of the screen. The links will be live in the downloaded version of the Course Outline.

William Blake

For a complete visual archive of Blake’s engravings, paintings, and other illustrated works, see “The William Blake Archive,” http://www.blakearchive.org/

“London” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43673/london-56d222777e969 http://www.blakearchive.org/copy/songsie.aa?descId=songsie.aa.illbk.46

“Chimney Sweeper” (Songs of Innocence) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43654/the-chimney-sweeper-when-my-mother-died-i-was-very- young http://www.blakearchive.org/copy/songsie.aa?descId=songsie.aa.illbk.12

“Marriage of Heaven and Hell” http://www.bartleby.com/235/253.html http://people.virginia.edu/~jdk3t/MarrOfHeaven&HellBlake1790.pdf

William Wordsworth

“Tintern Abbey” [“Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798"] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45527/lines-composed-a-few-miles-above-tintern-abbey-on- revisiting-the-banks-of-the-wye-during-a-tour-july-13-1798

“Resolution and Independence” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45545/resolution-and-independence

“Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802" https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45514/composed-upon-westminster-bridge-september-3-1802 Dr. David L. Clark / English and Cultural Studies 3WE3E !5 Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“Frost at Midnight” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43986/frost-at-midnight

“Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” http://www.bartleby.com/101/549.html

Anna Laetitia Barbaud

“The Rights of Women” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43615/the-rights-of-women

“To Mr. [S.T.] C[oleridge]” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51902/to-mr-st-coleridge

“Washing Day” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51901/washing-day

“Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, a Poem” http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/barbauld/1811/1811.html

John Keats

“Ode on a Grecian Urn” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44477/ode-on-a-grecian-urn

“Ode to a Nightingale” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44479/ode-to-a-nightingale

“Bright Star” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44468/bright-star-would-i-were-stedfast-as-thou-art

Felicia Hemans

“England’s Dead” http://www.bartleby.com/293/38.html

“The Homes of England” http://www.bartleby.com/360/1/183.html

“The Graves of a Household” http://www.bartleby.com/293/39.html

“Properzia Rossi” http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/hemans/records/records.html#rossi Dr. David L. Clark / English and Cultural Studies 3WE3E !6

Thirteen Important Notes About the Course

1. Class cancellations:

In the unlikely event of a class cancellation, students will be notified via class-wide email through Avenue.

2. E-mail policy and protocols:

McMaster University policy requires email communication between students, instructors and T.A’s to be conducted using McMaster email accounts. This policy protects confidentiality and confirms the identity of the student.

Since we are in a professional working environment, all e-mails to your instructor or T.A. must be written in full sentences (i.e. no point form, no text-messaging short form), and must contain a subject line that includes the course designation, “3WE3E." All e-mails must contain some form of salutation and valediction (i.e., “Dear Dr. Clark,” “Dear Stephanie and “Yours sincerely,” respectively, or equivalents). Receipt of all e-mails from your instructor or your TA must be acknowledged. For example, a simple “Thank you for getting back to me” will suffice. Be professional, courteous, and respectful in all communications.

Be assured that your instructor or T.A. will respond to your e-mail in a timely manner. Do not assume that you will hear back immediately.

3. Contacting the course Teaching Assistant:

Students are free and encouraged to contact Dr. Clark with all questions regarding the course. But questions should first be directed towards Stephanie Edwards, the course Teaching Assistant, who will happy to assist you. (See Stephanie’s contact information and office hours on the first page of this course outline.)

4. McMaster Policy on Academic Integrity: You are expected to exhibit honesty and use ethical behaviour in all aspects of the learning process. Academic credentials you earn are rooted in principles of honesty and academic integrity. Academic dishonesty is to knowingly act or fail to act in a way that results or could result in unearned academic credit or advantage. This behaviour can result in serious consequences—e.g., the grade of zero on an assignment, loss of credit with a notation on the transcript (notation reads: “Grade of F assigned for academic dishonesty”), and/or suspension or expulsion from the university. It is your responsibility to understand what constitutes academic dishonesty. For information on the various types of academic dishonesty, please refer to the Academic Integrity Policy, located at: http://www.mcmaster.ca/ academicintegrity.

The following illustrates only three forms of academic dishonesty: 1) Plagiarism—e.g., the submission of work that is not one’s own or for which other credit has been obtained. 2) Improper collaboration in group work. 3) Copying or using unauthorized aids in tests and examinations.

5. MSAF Statement

McMaster Student Absence Form (MSAF): In the event of an absence, students should review and follow the Academic Regulations in the Undergraduate Calendar “Requests for Relief for Missed Academic Term Work.” Dr. David L. Clark / English and Cultural Studies 3WE3E !7

6. Academic Accommodation of Students with Disabilities Statement

I am happy to assist students with academic accommodations. As a student with an accommodation, you are always welcome to meet with me during regular office hours to discuss how the course may be modified to best suit your teaching and learning needs.

Here is the university’s statement regarding Academic Accommodation of Students with Disabilities:

Students who require academic accommodation must contact Student Accessibility Services (SAS) to make arrangements with a Program Coordinator. Academic accommodations must be arranged for each term of study. Student Accessibility Services can be contacted by phone 905-525-9140 ext. 28652 or email [email protected]. For further information, consult McMaster University’s Policy for Academic Accommodation of Students with Disabilities.

7. Email Contact and Student Responsibility Statement

Please Note: The instructor and university reserve the right to modify elements of the course during the term. The university may change the dates and deadlines for any or all courses in extreme circumstances. If either type of modification becomes necessary, reasonable notice and communication with the students will be given with explanation and the opportunity to comment on changes. It is the responsibility of students to check their McMaster email and course websites weekly during the term and to note any changes. Announcements will be made in class and by using the course email distribution list.

8. Copies of Essays:

Keep a copy of the essays that you submit for the course.

9. Course evaluation:

Students will be invited to evaluate the course on-line towards the conclusion of the term.

10. Cell phones, sending and receiving texts, and internet connections:

All cell phone and mobile device notifications (ringers, etc.) must be turned off during class. With the exception of accessing course materials on Avenue, no surfing is permitted while class is in session. As a sign of your commitment to creating a professional and courteous teaching and learning environment, you are required to refrain from texting, emailing, and surfing in class. Students who find themselves unable to meet these minimal requirements will be asked to leave class.

11. The Student Walk Home Attendant Team (SWHAT):

Because this is an evening course, some students may want to avail themselves of the Student Walk Home Attendant Team (SWHAT). SWHAT is a service composed of volunteer students who will, upon request, walk or bus with you during the evening hours 7 days a week. SWHAT walkers can walk with you to your destination while providing safety and company. For more information, including a contact number, see: https://www.msumcmaster.ca/services-directory/3-student-walk-home-attendant-team-swhat Dr. David L. Clark / English and Cultural Studies 3WE3E !8 12. Audio recordings of class:

For privacy reasons, audio recordings of class are only allowed for students who have accommodations arranged through Student Accessibility Services and who have first consulted with the instructor. Audio recordings associated with student accommodations may only be used for the purposes of the course in which they are made and may not be reproduced or circulated.

13. McMaster University Grading Scale:

Grade Equivalent Grade Point Equivalent Percentages A+ 12 90-100 A 11 85-89 A- 10 80-84 B+ 9 77-79 B 8 73-76 B- 7 70-72 C+ 6 67-69 C 5 63-66 C- 4 60-62 D+ 3 57-59 D 2 53-56 D- 1 50-52 F 0 0-49 -- Failure