March 31-April 3, 2009

Tuesday:

Together, we are going to read about Edmund Burke and his "Reflections on the Revolution in France" (47-56). Then, on your own and for homework, you are to read about Mary Wollstonecraft and passages from "A Vindications of the Rights of Men" (56-64).

Thursday:

Question and answer session on assigned reading. If it seems that no one has done the reading, I will have give you a quick short-answer quiz, so it is up to you. In class, we will then read about Thomas Paine and passages from "The Rights of Man" (64-70). For Friday, you should have finished passages in the book on "A Vindication of the Rights of Women" (151-168).

Friday
Possible reading quiz on reading done in class and for homework.
If all goes well, you will not have homework over the break.

Week of March 23, 2009--change in plan for those absent on Thursday

Tuesday

Bring your anthologies for credit. You will need Volume B. We will finish "Young Frankenstein."

I'll try to find some artwork by William Blake. It's interesting to know that the famous poet was also a remarkable artist. If I don't have it on Tuesday, I will try very hard to have it on Thursday.

Begin reading "The Romantics and Their Contemporaries" (p. 3-14).

Be ready to answer the following questions:

From Literature and the Age: "Nought Was Lasting"

What world events marked the beginning of the "Romantic" period?

What did E. J. Hobsbawm say about revolutions?

What was natural law and natural principle?

What were the arguments for and against the rights of women?

How did people feel about the morality/immorality of slavery? What did the British have to do with slavery?

When did the first generation of Romantics emerge?

Know the following names: William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walter Scott, Anna Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Hannah More, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Robinson.

Know the second generation of the Romantics and when they emerged. Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, John Keats, Lord Byron, and John Clare.

What did Percy Shelley say in his famous A Defence of Poetry?

Know about the innovations in content and form.

How did lyric, epic, and autobiography change?

What were some new hybrid forms?

Romance, Romanticism, and the Powers of the Imagination

"'Imagination' itself became a subject of reflection, and often debate" (4).

What was the basis of eighteenth-century philosophy and science? What did the Romantics think of that?

Visionary power.

"Poets tended to define 'Imagination' against what it was not, even categorically the opposite of: thus, imagination vs. reality; imagination vs. reason; vs. science; vs. the understanding (especially in its 'fixities' and 'certainties'); vs. mere 'fancy'; even vs. religious truth. Blake declared its priority: 'What is now proved was once, only imagin'd' (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell); it is imagination that can 'see a World in a Grain of Sand/ And a Heaven in a Wild Flower' (Auguries of Innocence)" (5).

How did Blake see Wordsworth?

Who defined "'Primary Imagination' as 'the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception,' analogous to but a lesser power than divine creation"?

Where is poetry written?

What does an echo have to do with it?

What does conscious will have to do with it?

What other poet liked binaries?

Keats compared Imagination to _____________'s dream. He was referring to the dream of _______________.

Like his contemporaries, Keats also tied imagination with ______________, ______________, ________________, _______________, and ______________.

What did Keats mean by "male imagination often projects an eroticized female or feminized object"?

What did he think about women writers?

What kinds of dangers did men often write about? What were women supposed to be like in contrast?

"Imagination was a heady romance--an inspiring force, a dangerous seduction. Not coincidentally, the issues often took shape in the language of romance. The rapid changes, new demands, and confusions of the age often pressed writers into imagining worlds elsewhere, the impulse of the mode form which the 'Romantic' era gets its name: the 'Romance'" (6).

Samuel Johnson's 1755 Dictionary "defined it thus: 'A military fable of the middle ages; a tale of wild adventures in war and love.' In a variety of genres--ballad, narrative poem, novel--Romance turned to other places and times, or shaped timeless, a historial tales of quest and desire, love and adventure. A medieval idiom, which flourished into a 'gothic' vogue, supplied vivid language for Byron's Childe Harold, Keats's La Belle Dame and The Eve of St. Agnes (1820), and Hemans many poems of the age of the Crusades. Romance could inhabit the even more distant pasts of Anglo-Saxon legend or classical mythology. Percy Shelley and Keats turned to the landscapes and myths of ancient Greece as resources of imagination before the age of Christian 'truth'" (6).

What did the Romantics have in common with the Victorians?

Johnson's Dictionary--'romarrick': '1) resembling the tales of romances; wild. 2) Improbable; false. 3) Fanciful, full of wild scenery'" (7).

What is Johnson's second definition for "'romance'"?

"Romance is not only the genre of enchanted dreams and inspired visions, but also of superstitions and spells, delusions and nightmares. Coleridge said that the poetry he wrote for Lyrical Ballads was devoted to 'persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic.' Infused with sensations of supernatural power, or fed by opiated fantasies, the magical mystery tours of supernatural romance may hold the keys to paradise or the passage to hell, or both by turns" (7).

What kinds of complexities do we find in romantic works?

How was "romance" or "romanticism" different for women? How could it be sexist? How could it hurt the culture as a whole?

What did Mary Wollstonecraft say about some of the dangers?

What were the current beliefs about what was feminine?

How did the Romantics deal with the outcasts?

Who said that "poetry should be a 'spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,' and explained, in a later version, that in his poems 'the feeling...gives importance to the action and situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling'"? What do "incidents of common life" have to do with creating art?

The French Revolution and Its Reverberations

When did the Bastille fall?

What was the Declaration of the Rights of Man?

How did that affect literature?

When was the French monarchy overthrown?

Who were the Jacobins? Who were the Girondins? What was the Reign of Terror? What was the nae of the king and queen guillotined in 1793?

What was the Peace of Amiens?

When did Napoleon lose at Waterloo?

What did Edmund Burke write in 1790?

What did Mary Wollstonecraft write in 1790?

What did Thomas Paine write in 1791?

When did William Godwin write Political Justice?

What and when was the Terror of Robespierre?

What happened?

In what year did Napoleon invade the Iberian Peninsula?

What did Coleridge think about this?

When did Paine flee to France? Why?

Why were "twelve London radicals" arrested? With what were they charged?

What happened to habeas corpus in 1794? Why?

What were the Gagging Acts of 1795?

What was the Pentridge Rising of 1817 and the Canto Street Conspiracy of 1820?

What were the Corn Laws? What impact did that have upon the poor?

In 1800, which groups of people were the only ones allowed to vote?

What happened to the Prince Regent in January 1817?

What impact did the Industrial Revolution have upon daily life?

Know about the rise of the capitalists.

What were "the notorious Six Acts"?

THURSDAY

I will check to see that you have answered the questions. Brief discussion/review. Those of you that were not here need to show me during the next class.

Video on "The Great Artists: Blake." Take notes.

Those who are not present must do the following in place:

Begin reading "The Monarchy" (p. 14).

Know the following:

Who was George III?

What happened to him in 1765 and again in 1788?

How was the Prince Regent transforming the face of London?

Know the names of the parks and other significant sites.

Read : "Industrial England and 'Never-Resting Labour'" (16-20)

Answer the following:

1. Who wrote On the Principle of Population As It Affects the Future Improvement of Society?

2. In what year was that written?

3. What was the theory behind the work?

4. Which war "fueled a surge: 'A race of merchants and manufacturers and bankers and loan jobbers and contractors'"?

5. In what year was Victoria crowned?

6. What happened in the countryside in the 1790s and again in 1815?

7. What were the Corn Laws and the "Enclosure Acts"?

8. How did the pattern of country landholding change?

9. What did the 1811 census reveal?

10. Who wrote Lyrical Ballads? To whom did he direct this work?

11. What was Manchester known for? In what year did the city incorporate?

12. What was life like for factory workers?

13. What was life like for poor children?

14. What is meant by "laissez-faire"?

15. What is the name of the economist who first used that expression?

16. What was the name of his famous book?

17. What was Wales known for?

18. Who was Richard Pennant?

19. How did Wales begin to change?

20. What aspects of the industrial revolution helped to bring out Romantic works of art and literature?

21. What role did locomotives play in changing Great Britain?

22. How was the British Empire expanding?

23. Who was Warren Hastings?

"Consumers and Commodities" (20-22).

Answer the following questions:

1. What was the role of the East India Company?

2. Who "sneered at Britain as 'a nation of shopkeepers'"?

3. What were the major goods?

4. What was one of the major illegal trades?

5. What poets and poems did this illegal trade inspire?

6. What was Laudanum?

7. What did Marx mean by "'religion was the opium of the masses'"?

8. What were the Opium Wars?

9. How were morals adjusted in relation to economic opportunities?

10. Who was Josiah Wedgwood?

11. How did advertising start to change?

12. What kinds of publications made it possible for some writers to earn a living?

13. Name some of those writers.

14. How did farmers' spending habits begin to change?

15. How did the family unit begin to change?

Read "Authorship, Authority, and 'Romanticism'" (22-25).

Answer the following questions:

1. Which authors were deemed the "quintessential 'romantics'"?

2. What are some of the names of female "romantics"?

3. Why did Francis Jeffrey disapprove of the "'new poets'"?

4. Who were some of these new poets?

5. What was Southey?

6. What was the "Lake School"?

7. What was the "Cockney School"?

8. What was Romanticism? What other forms did it take?

9. How does it emerge in literature?

10. What famous work and by what author appeared in 1789?

11. What other new authors and poets began to emerge?

12. What was Mary Wollstonecraft's role?

13. What famous work did she write? When?

14. Who was Anna Letitia Barbauld? Why were people shocked?

15. What did the British Critic say about Heman?

Continue with "Popular Prose" (25-28).

Answer the following questions:

1. Who wrote Confessions of an Opium Eater?

2. What kinds of topics were being written or spoken about?

3. Who published the Political Register?

4. When was that publication founded?

5. What did the Romantic age do for poetry?

6. What did Wordsworth say in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads?

7. How did newspapers begin to evolve and change?

8. How was it that the masses came to become more literate?

9. How did William Wordsworth change the world?

Friday:

We will take a look at some of the writers of the Romantic era.

Week of March 16, 2009

Tuesday

Review of "The Rocking Horse Winner," "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," and Frankenstein.

Thursday

Essay/creative writing piece related to one or more of the works above.

Friday

TBA

Week of March 9th, 2009

Tuesday:

4th Period--discussion of Frankenstein and "The Cat That Went to Trinity." Introduction to film versions of "Frankenstein"--James Whale's "Frankenstein" and "Bride of Frankenstein." Homework: Read the criticisms in your book (p. 262-273). The first is by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Frankenstein and a Critique of Imperialism." The second is by William Veeder, "The Women of Frankenstein." Expect a reading quiz on Thursday.

6th Period: The class was assigned to literary criticisms. We will break into four groups-two groups for each criticism. You will receive a quiz grade for explaining certain aspects of your essay. Next, begin reading Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's "Frankenstein and a Critique of Imperialism" and William Veeder's "The Women of Frankenstein." These are in your textbook (pp. 262-273). If we finish the other discussion early, you will also read Marilyn Butler's "Frankenstein and Radical Science" (pp. 302-313). Expect a reading quiz on Thursday. Students are responsible for the information in both criticisms.


Thursday:

4th Period--Reading quiz on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Frankenstein and a Critique of Imperialism." The second is by William Veeder, "The Women of Frankenstein." Discussion. More of the "Frankenstein" movies. If we are lucky, we might get to "Young Frankenstein." Homework: Movie reviews of James Whale's "Frankenstein" movies.

6th Period: Quiz on literary criticisms. Another criticism will be assigned in class. That will be due on Friday.

Friday:

Prepare for a unit test that you will have next Tuesday. The test will cover "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Frankenstein (and any Faustian connections), Robertson Davies' "The Cat that Went to Trinity," and literary criticisms according to what was assigned in your class. Fourth period's test will be somewhat different than sixth periods because of some different content assigned.