Check here regularly for homework assignments, course announcements, and schedule changes. Any updates will normally be posted by 8:00 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

For Thursday, May 8th (Day 29):

As I balefully predicted on Tuesday, l won't have your final project drafts ready for you by classtime, but I will once again pass around the sign-up sheet for individual appointments: I've opened up as many hours as I can on Friday and Monday. (If for some reason I still haven't gotten to your draft when we meet, I will read it on the spot and give you some quick-and-dirty feedback.)

You're not obligated to come see me, of course; I expect that many of the reactions and much of the advice you've gotten from your classmates will be every bit as good as--maybe better than--any pearls of wisdom I might drop.

I'll see you Thursday for last words, course evaluations, and some talk about what comes next in the English major and what comes after.

For Tuesday, May 6th (Day 28):

Well, we're all running on fumes at this point. (For some reason, the lovely British word "shambolic" kept running through my mind during today's class.) But I hope you can use the weekend to refill your tank; we're in the home stretch now.

Concentrate on giving your working group members some useful, detailed, and effective feedback on their drafts. Think about what you need/want from your readers--and what kind of feedback in general is helpful when you're working on a draft, and then give back in kind. Please read diligently the handout I gave you on Thursday and use it as a template for your written responses. If you missed class Thursday, you should contact me for a copy of that handout (and for advice on how to get a draft of your project to some other readers ASAP). The entire class period on Tuesday will be devoted to conferences on these drafts.

My Monday office hours will be slightly time-shifted: I'll begin them at 11:00 so that I can disappear for a meeting from 12-1.

For Thursday, May 1 (May Day - Workers of the World: Unite!) (Day 27):

Final Project Drafts are due! Bring in three copies to distribute to class members and one more to give to me. We'll return briefly to those in-class exercises on summary and paraphrase before they disappear into oblivion, talk a bit more about the fine points and pitfalls of plagiarism, discuss giving people effective feedback on their work, and perhaps do some practice bilbiographic entries in MLA style.

As I mentioned on the spec sheet for the final project: the farther along these drafts are, the better feedback people will be able to give you. But where there are holes, you should fill them in: insert notes to your readers describing how you plan to bridge the gap from one fragment of text to another, the options you're considering for a conclusion, the doubts you've been entertaining about how best to relate some historical research you've done to your primary text, etc., etc. In short: give your readers as complete a picture as you can of what you imagine the finished product will look like, how its argument will proceed, and how its pieces (including pieces you haven't yet revealed) will fit together.

For Tuesday, April 29th (Day 26):

Your first priority: work on those final projects! (Many years ago, the English major justified converting all of its courses to 4 units with the explanation that we would assign enough work to be done outside of class to merit an extra unit. So.) You should really have a serviceable draft by the end of this weekend. Then you can spend the final two days whipping it into good enough shape to show to someone else.

Also: we'll get to the material on paraphrase & quotation that we didn't get 'round to on Thursday, and we'll talk a bit more about plagiarism, as well. There may be time for you to touch base with other folks working on the same text as you. And you heard it here: after three, count 'em three, solid weeks, I will return the Catcher projects if it kills me.

Some follow-up to Thursday's class: Charles Darling's material on Effective Quotation.

If you haven't already checked out Section 3.7 and Chapter 5 of the print version of the MLA Guide, then run your eye over Michael Harvey's material on MLA Documentation. Don't commit this stuff to memory, obviously--just make yourself aware of it so you can find the information you need when you need it.

For Thursday, April 24th (Day 25):

INFORMAL WRITING ASSIIGNMENT #8: Take the hapless student paper that we worked on in class today (that's a live link to the document, for those who missed class) and continue correcting its errors in spelling, punctuation and format, a la MLA. Hand it in with 10 errors or fewer for full credit.

If you didn't get to it for Tuesday, read what the MLA Guide has to say about summary, paraphrase, and citation. If you want to read ahead, you can also cover the chapter on "Plagiarism," study the section on the mechanics of quotation (3.7), and peruse Chapter 5 ("Preparing the List of Works Cited"). For purposes of comparison, feel free to read what Prof. Charles Darling (Capital Community College) has to say about the same topics.

For Tuesday, April 22d (Day 24):

You've got little to do but select the poem or short story you'll be working on for the Final Project and GET STARTED, if you haven't already, since a first draft is due in just under two weeks from now.

The rest of the semester will be devoted to various nuts-and-bolts issues (go ahead: heave a huge sigh of relief, you who have tired of pondering big, theoretical questions), beginning with MLA Style. In preparation for Tuesday's class, you could haul out your MLA Handbook (and/or check out the MLA sites in the "Style and Mechanics" section of the General Reference page of this website) and bone up on summary, paraphrase, and citation.

You could also have a look at St. Martin's Tutorial on Avoiding Plagiarism (Margaret Price, U. Mass - Amherst; Bedford/St. Martin's Press), including the Plagiarism Handouts.

For Thursday, April 17th (Day 23):

Read the assignment sheet for the final project carefully, pass your eyes over all the texts you may choose to work on, and come to class with questions about the project--and/or about how the project would work in relation to text X--that are as specific as possible. As a warm-up for this project, prepare yourself for an in-class exercise that revisits an old warhorse. (No, it's not "Lycidas" again!)

For Tuesday, April 15th (Day 22):

I've put the Final Project spec sheet online (see the Course home page), and I'll entertain questions about the Project in class on Tuesday. The savvy among you will begin doing the preliminary reading and giving some serious thought to how you'd like to approach this. The due date for first drafts will be here before you know it, and this is a project that's going to require a lot of preparation.

Tuesday, we'll come back to the Ad Council spot we didn't get around to today, and I'll also have some things to say about the two excerpts from Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism in the Course Reader. (Sorry about the high total page count. Skim if you must--but it's the last really long reading assignment of this nature that you'll have from me this semester--and I hope you'll find Said a fairly engaging writer.)

I'm offering these readings by Said (that's pronounced "sah-eed") in part to flesh out some of Kavanagh's ideas--and in part to flesh out what all this stuff (about ideology) has to do with literature. We know that the “social order” is structured partly along class lines, but that class is not the only organizing principle. (Our society--and our individual identities--are also stratified on the basis of many other categories.) So if ideology’s purpose is ultimately to "interpellate" you into your place in the social order and to encourage you to accept that place as more or less natural, then ideology must involve more than just class. There are ideologies of gender, of race, of sexuality, of age, of nationality, etc. If you're taking (or have taken) Engl 220, this may be familiar territory.

Contemporary critical theory holds that l iterature is one of the “apparatuses” ( to use one of Kavanagh’s favorite terms) by which ideologies are constructed, disseminated, and perpetuated. Analyzing literary texts, then, can give us some insight into the various ideologies in play at any given historical and cultural moment. More pertinently (for our purposes), it can help us to historicize them, to trace their origins and evolution. But more generally, it can also help us understand how all such ideological mechanisms work.

Said is concerned with locating the origins of certain ideas about race, nation, and empire--certain attitudes that the West holds towards the non-West--that were in full bloom in the mid- to late 19th century, but whose vestiges are still with us today.

Now here, after that long-winded preface, is my sole homework question: how would you connect Said's insights about Victorian literature with your own insights into the the "I Am an American" PSA? Jot down some notes to bring with you to class, and try to give your answer some nuance and detail.

For Thursday, April 10th (Day 21):

We'll discuss James Kavanagh's "Ideology" (Online Course Reader)--the last time (for a little while) that I'll ask you to sit in a circle and have your teeth pulled over a weighty article written by some English professor. (I appreciate the fact that you've been tolerating this m.o. for several days!)

And even though I've been sitting on the last one for a while, I'm gonna go ahead and issue Informal Writing Assignment #7. Short answers are OK:

• In what various ways has the term “ideology” been used? What, by contrast, does Kavanagh mean by it?
• What's a "subject"? And what does it mean for a subject to be "interpellated"?
• What does all this have to do with literature and history? Referring back to the articles we've read by the Ohmanns and Lawrence Lipking, for example, how might we understand Catcher and "Lycidas" as "ideological" texts in the sense that Kavanagh uses that term?

Next, take a look at this Public Service Announcement produced by the Ad Council just two weeks after 9/11. Carefully read the way the ad is discussed on the introductory page, then watch the ad itself by clicking the links under "View the PSA" near the top of the page. (You may also wish to read the Ad Council's description of itself and its mission.) The following is a continuation of the above assignment:

• How could we read this text "ideologically"? How does this ad construct a particular kind of reality? How would you characterize that reality? What does it promote or take for granted? What is it attempting to "naturalize"? What does it suppress in the process?
• If this is a text that exemplifies what Kavanagh describes (310) as a "solicitation" (or, in Althusser’s terms, an "interpellation") of a specific subject (make sure you understand how he's using that term), then what kind of "subject" is it appealing to?

For Tuesday, April 8th (Day 20):

Catcher Projedts Due! (And remember, it's extremely bad form to miss class or show up late on days when major projects are due.) We'll have a visit from Professor Nikola Hobbel, a specialist in English Education who regularly teaches a course in Young Adult Literature. She hasn't asked me to have you read anything in advance, so your only assignment is to show up and be scintillated--and ready to talk about "adolescent literature," the assumptions that keep that category alive, and how Catcher got pigeon-holed into it. If you want to read ahead, there's a piece by James Kavanagh on "Ideology" (and possibly one or two pieces by Edward Said [that's pronounced "Sah-eed"]) which we're slated to take up Thursday.

For Thursday, April 3rd (Day 19):

I know you're toiling away on Catcher Projects, but here's one last critical piece to wrestle with--and a short time to prepare it: Lawrence Lipking’s “The Genius of the Shore: Lycidas, Adamastor, and the Poetics of Nationalism.”

This is a hard one--maybe the hardest yet. But in case you haven't figured it out already: the reason I'm asking you to devote a fair amount of time and scrupulous attention to these high-powered academic essays (by the Ohmanns and now by Lawrence Lipking) is that you're going to be doing something very similar to what they do for the final project--details to come, in due time. It's important, then, that you get a sense of the kinds of things that "New Historicists" of various stripes tend to do when making sense of literary texts.

At the risk of overselling its difficulty, let me just say that this is a dense, complexly argued, and subtle historicist reading of Milton’s elegy; you may find some of it elusive, not least because it presumes you know something about English history in the seventeenth century. But it's not out of your grasp, I promise. Take careful notes—highlighting and annotating what appear to you to be the main ideas of the text, writing marginal notes to help you synthesize or summarize ideas or to make explicit points that Lipking is making only inferentially, and so on. (Remember that "active reading" handout I distributed online a couple of weeks ago?)

You may stop when Lipking turns his attentions to The Lusiads and the figure of Adamastor (beginning in the second column of page 214), though the more ambitious among you are of course welcome to read on to the end.

If you're on board with the Ohmanns, it may be relatively easy to see why a text like Catcher in the Rye cries out for a historicist reading, but what about texts that are less obviously “historical” and more apparently personal (or, at most, historical only in the “intrinsic,” literary-historical sense)--like “Lycidas,” for example?

Here are some questions intended to help you sort that out:

• Consider (even before you begin reading) the title of Lipking's essay: what do you make of it? What does it lead you to expect? Who, for instance, is the "Genius of the Shore"? Who or what is "Adamastor"? How might you find out? What does the phrase "poetics of nationalism" suggest?
• Read the first paragraph of the essay carefully. How is Lipking's use of history different from Tillyard's? What kinds of connections does he make between history and "literature"? How does this reflect what are presumably his ideas about the aims of literary criticism? What does Lipking do here that would make Northrop Frye apoplectic?
• What, for Lipking, is the role of Edward King in the poem? (What was his role for Tillyard?) Who is Lipking's Milton? As compared to Tillyard's?
• What's the effect of all the maps? Why are they included? What do they add to Lipking's text?

For Tuesday, April 1st (Day 18):

Yes--if you've been paying attention to the syllabus, you know that class is cancelled on Thursday, March 27th (no foolin'!), as I'm traveling to a conference. You can certainly get a jump on the next major reading assignment (Lawrence Lipking's piece on "Lycidas" in the online reader) if you want--and you should certainly use the next week to make some serious headway on the Catcher project. (I'll be available for consultation by e-mail, and I'll be scheduling a slew of office hours next week.) But our April Fool's agenda will be the piece by Carol & Richard Ohmann that you may already have read over the break. If not, then read it now. If so, then read it again, even more carefully. I'll still accept Informal Writing Assignment #6 (see Day 17, below) on April 1st.

I also want to exhort you to check out, explore, and make liberal use of the "Catcher Toolbox" that's linked from the front page of this website: a collection of useful, reputable, and/or interesting articles and websites that I've assembled for your perusal as you lay plans for and buid your own Catcher Project.

Oh--and here's that e-lecture I was promising (threatening?) in class today....

For Tuesday, March 25th (Day 17):

There are two items you should be interested in: a handout on active reading that I allude to below, and the spec sheet for the Catcher in the Rye project. (Those underlined bits are live weblinks.) As for routine homework:

First, read the excerpt from E.M.W. Tillyard's Milton in the online Reader. Everyone should read the piece, but here's a make-up/extra credit opportunity for those whose informal writing assignment status isn't quite what they'd like it to be:

Think--and write--about the following (brief answers are fine):

1. This isn't a theoretical manifesto, exactly (it's an example of what Patterson would call "Old Historicism," in fact), but I think we can still infer from Tillyard's approach to the poem something about what he considers to be the aims of literary criticism. So I ask you: judging from what you see here, what does Tillyard suggest are, or should be, the aims of lit crit?

2. Why, according to Tillyard, should we continue to care about "Lycidas"?

3. How would you characterize Tillyard's tone here?

4. What would Northrop Frye say to E.M.W. Tillyard about "Lycidas"?

5. And what would Lee Patterson say to him?

Then: get a jump on Carol Ohmann and Richard Ohmann, "Reviewers, Critics, and The Catcher in the Rye" (in the online Reader.) Read this essay as carefully and critically as you know how.  Use the handout that I referred to above). Take notes, then stop and review periodically to see if you can summarize the preceding couple of paragraphs and reiterate the argument successfully.  Note any comments and/or questions that you have, be they critical or appreciative, and (as usual) come to class ready to talk.

In addition, put down in writing your own answers to the following questions (this will be Informal Writing Assignment #6):

1. Focus in on one of the essay's numbered sections. (Baggett through Deaton, take Section I; DeRusha through Nehl, Section II; Nesbitt through Sheaffer, Section III; Seltzer through Wilkinson, Section IV.) What's the gist of the argument that the Ohmanns put forward there? I.e., what are the main point(s) of this section, and how are they developed and/or elaborated?

2. How do the Ohmanns bring "history" into the picture in your section? I.e., how do they relate various postwar phenomena to what they see as the central concerns of the novel, to Salinger himself, and/or to the novel's reception--both immediately after its publication and in the years that followed?

Finally, some brief answers to these additional questions:

3. Do you find their argument convincing? How so/how not?

4. Are there questions that you have about Catcher that their approach doesn't resolve--or even address--satisfactorily?

For Thursday, March 13th (Day 16):

We'll probably spend most of Thursday on Lee Patterson (the piece from the online reader that was assigned for Tuesday the 11th), but I'd recommend giving the Tillyard piece a quick once-over now, too.

Here's your fifth informal writing assignment:

Towards the end of today's class, we were beginning to consider what it might mean to “historicize” Catcher In the Rye.  As a way of preparing for the Catcher project, let's take that work a bit further. Here are my prompts again: What sorts of things do you think you might want or need to know more about--or at least to keep in mind, historically speaking--in order to fully understand this novel? (I'm thinking in terms of allusions, images, details of the setting, etc.)  What apparently "universal" concerns might actually turn out to be historically or culturally specific?  What sorts of things do we take for granted, by virtue of the fact that white upper-middle-class male adolescence in early 1950s New York is perhaps not so much different from white middle-class adolescence anywhere else in the U.S. (or the industrialized world?) in 2008?  What would need to be explained to a visitor from Mars?  What might someone from rural Zimbabwe find puzzling?  What might appear bizarre to a madrassah student in Afganistan?  What would be utterly meaningless to a reader from 1650 or 1750 or 1850? Take any of all of the above questions and make an inventory of no fewer than ten (10) items. Annotate your inventory with some explanations for your choices.

We'll take it up after the break, but you'd be well advised to get a jump on the short excerpt from E.M.W. Tillyard's Milton in the online Reader. Everyone should read the piece, but here's a make-up/extra credit opportunity for those whose informal writing assignment status isn't quite what they'd like it to be:

Think--and write--about the following (brief answers are fine):

1. This isn't a theoretical manifesto, exactly (it's an example of what Patterson would call "Old Historicism," in fact), but I think we can still infer from Tillyard's approach to the poem something about what he considers to be the aims of literary criticism. So I ask you: judging from what you see here, what does Tillyard suggest are, or should be, the aims of lit crit?

2. Why, according to Tillyard, should we continue to care about "Lycidas"?

3. How would you characterize Tillyard's tone here?

4. What would Northrop Frye say to E.M.W. Tillyard about "Lycidas"?

5. And what would Lee Patterson say to him?

Finally: here's a link to the ballads I showed you today (this is an old version that doesn't include the ballads I added from our class--I'll do that on Thursday).

For Tuesday, March 11h (Day 15):

First, I'll get you to debrief me about Thursday's freewheeling panel discussion--and we can come back and tie up a few loose ends about Eagleton (and, if you really want, Eliot). (For a nifty summary of the "timeline" of the history of English Studies that Eagleton traces, kindly prepared by professor extraordinaire Marianne Ahokas, click here.)

Then, we begin to expand our own vision of what it means to study texts "historically." Let me pitch you a couple of broad questions first (write out some short answers just to prepare yourself for a discussion):

• In what ways is history (a knowledge of history and/or the study of history) vital to the study of literature, do you think? In what ways is it irrelevant? For the sake of argument, make both cases.
• Now apply those same questions to Catcher In the Rye specifically. In what ways is history vital to the study of this text? In what ways is it irrelevant?

And then a couple of questions about the article by Lee Patterson (seriously--everybody, including me, could stand to work on their reading retention & comprehension!):

• Patterson identifies three types of “literary history”: an “old” extrinsic approach; an intrinsic approach; and a “new” extrinsic approach. In a few sentences each, summarize the goals, rationale, and methodology of each of those three approaches.
• What questions would an "old" (extrinsic) historicist approach ask of Catcher? What questions would a new historicist approach ask?
• Would you regard Holden Caulfield's story as any less a “verbal artifact” (Patterson 259) if it were suddenly revealed to you that it was not a novel, but an autobiography (or a psychiatric "case history," or the transcript of an extended interview done by an early 1950s sociologist doing research on juvenile delinquency and teen-age angst)?

For Thursday, March 6th (Day 14):

This day's class will feature a panel of English professors talking about what it is (or what they think it is) they "profess."  There is no required reading--though you can certainly read the piece in the online Reader by T.S. Eliot if you want--I think it's pretty interesting, and a good companion piece to Eagleton in that it offers a much different version of the history of "English."  

You should come to class with a question you could pose to one or more of the panelists. (Confirmed as of this writing: Susan Bennett, a specialist in English Education and current department chair; Jim Dodge, a writer of fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction; and Barry Dalsant, originally an 18th-century British Lit scholar. I'm working on Janet Winston, who teaches Cultural Studies and late 19th- and early 20th-century British literature, and Marianne Ahokas, an early Americanist).   Your question may be personal, professional, or political (or any combination of the three); it may be naive or sophisticated; but it should have something to do with English Studies and/or your relation to that field, it should be reasonably well formulated, and it should reflect something that you're genuinely curious about.

For Tuesday, March 4th (Day 13) (Informal written assignment #4):

The assigned reading (see the online Reader, Week 7) is another piece by everyone's favorite smart-aleck, Terry Eagleton, called "The Rise of English." The meat of this chapter, for my purposes, is the first 1/3, through about page 30. The rest, about T.S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis and I. A. Richards (apparently if you aspired to be a prominent critic in the 1920s and 30s, you had to go by your initials) and the American “New Critics” and so on is not without interest, especially if you happen to be taking "Practical Criticism" right now, though it traces some sectarian squabbles so intricately that it may confuse you if you don't already know a bit about all those positions. Read that portion mainly for its general outline, and do the best you can.

I'm still making up my mind whether to have you read Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" later in the week--or to assign something else instead--so stay tuned!  

Informal written assignment #4. Write out some thoughtful answers to the following questions and be prepared to discuss them in class:

1. So what did you know previously about the history of English? Had you ever thought of it as a created field of study, or did it just seem to be "there" like an object in the natural world? Has Eagleton changed the way you think about it--are you affected by the knowledge of its dirty secrets, and the somewhat dubious circumstances of its birth? Does Eagleton’s (now 20-year-old) characterization of this discipline jibe with your real-life experience of it?

2. Does Eagleton convince you (1) that Lit once was "intimately related to questions of social power" and (2) that our field has anything to do with power and ideology today? Are lit and culture still thought of as social cement for binding us together, imbuing us with a shared sense of pride in national lit and language, and getting us to cheer for the greatest hits of Western Civ (or even just making us "better people")? Related questions: do think that any of English's original ideological aims succeeded to any great degree? Does it seem to you that any of its nefarious plans for social control were ever borne out? (If so, then are we all just conservative dupes?) Or doesn’t that matter? Whose interests does English serve now, today? What did you personally intend to "get" out of an English education?

For Thursday, February 28th (Day 12): Ballad Project Due!

A fair amount of prep for today, actually. There's maybe an hour's worth of online reading, for starters; check the Course Reader table of contents for Week 6.  When you've finished it, choose one formal property of fiction—plot, characterization, setting, or narrative point of view—and consider how that property is manipulated in Catcher.  (E.g., for plot, you’d compare the order of events as they "really" happened versus how we learn about them and piece them together in the text, and consider what that selective manipulation of chronology adds to the story. For setting, you'd make as complete an inventory as you can of the physical settings, times of day and year, the social milieux, etc., and consider their significance.  For narrative point of view, you’d carefully examine the "character" of the narrator and how it's revealed: who is telling us this story? what can you say about the narrative voice? how "present" (overbearing?) is it? what's this voice holding back from us? how do we manage to glean any information beyond what the narrator gives us? and so on).

Our aim is to spend (most of) the day considering the usefulness of formalist analysis: how far can we get with this book by paying close attention to the text itself—i.e., the words on the page and the formal properties of fiction?  Our guiding question will be: how do those elements of form—plot, characterization, setting, point of view—contribute to Catcher’s meaning?

Now: as a warmup for that discussion--and presuming that the nature of this novel means that "point of view" is its most salient element--go back through the text (and your copious notes on it!), and find and mark at least two passages: one in which Holden seems a relatively reliable narrator, and one in which he's unreliable. Be prepared to discuss the passages in class.

For Tuesday, February 26th (Day 11):

N.B. The new due date for the Ballad Project is Thursday, February 28th!

It's enough that you've got a novel to read while working on the Ballad Project, I think. (And remember, there will be a short reading quiz--so make sure you finish the book.) Just the same, here are a couple of things to think about, and perhaps jot down some notes about, for Tuesday's class:

• What's your personal history with this text? Where and when did you first read it? Was it assigned in high school? If so, how was it taught--that is, what were you asked to do with it? (E.g., produce a book report? Present a research paper? Write a journal entry? Choreograph an interpretive dance, "Holden Among the Ducks"?) What were you taught about it--what do you "know" about The Catcher in the Rye as a result of reading it in class and, presumably, having a teacher "explain" it all to you?
• Aside from the classroom experience, what do you think of Catcher? Is this one of the touchstone texts in your life? Is it the book that made you decide to be an English major? Do you consider it an abomination that should be cast into the fiery pits of hell? A mildly annoying piece of fluff? Or what?
• Finally, try to assign it to some sub-genre of fiction. It's not a romance novel, clearly, or a murder-mystery, but how would you categorize the generic conventions it deploys? What other texts would you slot in the same category?

For Thursday, February 21st (Day 10):

Required reading: Daniel Chandler's "Working Within Genres" in the online Course Reader.

We’re going to consider the limits and uses of thinking in terms of genre. Here's an experiment: before you do the reading, think of, and write down, the name of a genre you know well. You needn't restrict yourself to written or literary genres, by the way: if it makes more sense for you to think in terms of film or TV or music (e.g., "romantic comedies," "game shows," "trip-hop," "post-bop jazz," and so on), then do so by all means. Make a list of the defining features of the genre you selected (romantic comedies: story revolves around man and woman, usually young; at outset, they don’t know each other; they meet or are thrown together somehow; they clash, or an obstacle of some kind appears to prevent a relationship from developing; plot revolves around removal of obstacle or gradual discovery of compatability; ends in marriage or presumed marriage of principals).

Then read Chandler’s discussion of genre, keeping in mind the specific genre you identified. To what extent do you think the existence (the constraints?) of this recognized genre has inhibited creativity? To what extent has it fostered it? In what ways does knowledge of the conventions of this genre lead to “passive consumption,” in your experience? In what ways does such knowledge make it possible to “identify, select, and interpret texts”?

If you're interested in getting a preview of the Ballad Project, it's now online (on the course home page). But if you'd rather not think about one more thing just yet, then just wait till Thursday.

Postscript: More on Dudley Randall and "The Ballad of Birmingham" (placing it squarely in the broadside tradition) at Cary Nelson's Modern American Poetry site at the University of Illinois. (And here's another interesting site on Randall.) Also: a story from NPR's All Things Considered on Hal Willner's "Rogue's Gallery."

Executive Fiat: y'know that Lycidas project you're busting your ass over? Well, keep on acting as if it's due Tuesday. Then, on Tuesday, instead of handing it in, spend another two days taking a critical look at what you've done, revising and augmenting, if necessary--and do a really kick-ass job. Then hand the whole thing in on Thursday, instead.

For Tuesday, February 19th (Day 9) (informal writing assignment #3):

Re-read both the Wordsworth and the Dickinson poems that you prepared for Thursday the 14th. (In fact, re-read--or simply read for the first time, and don't embarass yourself again--the material on the ballad that you were to have prepared for Thursday the 14th, as well.) Speculate wildly: why would Wordsworth and/or Dickinson haved chosen to use these particular stanzaic forms—that is, the ballad or hymn stanza? (Wrangle your speculation into a half-page or a page of prose.)

Now give some thought (again, in writing) to how these or any of the other ballads you read last week would be different—i.e., how their meanings would change—if they were written as epigrammatic heroic couplets, say, or as limericks (or elegiac stanzas or or villanelles or terza rima or double dactyls or Spenserian sonnets or sestinas or Rhymes Royal, or any of a number of other set stanza forms).

And finally, go ahead--you know you want to: take a stab at transforming, say, "The Bonny Hind" into an epigrammatic couplet, or "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" into a limerick. (Those are only two possibilities--not meant to be exhaustive. You could choose a different poem or a different set stanza form.) Go the Glossary of Poetic Terms on the "General Reference" page of the class website to look up some of those possibilities before making your choice.

(By the way: if you're interested in hearing more ballads--and who isn't?--you may want to sample some of the collections available on Smithsonian Folkways records at eMusic.com: Broadside Ballads, Vol. 1, English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Vol. 1, and British Traditional Ballads in the Southern Mountains, Vol. 1. Or you might also check out the new collection of pirate ballads and sea chanteys that I mentioned, "Rogue's Gallery," an Anti Records.)

For Thursday, February 14th (Day 8):

Nothing terribly sharp or probing: it's the fourth week of the semester and my brain, not to mention my crud-battered body (ouch! what an image), is already losing its edge. So I'll hit you with these dull questions and see what sort of discussion we can hone on Thursday. Read the ballads (and the various resources about the ballad) in the online Course Reader--you know, the ones assigned on the syllabus--carefully.

• According to the Literary Encyclopedia (or any other source you might have stumbled across), what's the difference between the various types of ballads (in terms of history & origins, typical formal characteristics, etc.)?  In which category would you slot each of the ballads I had you read?
• Why do you think some hifalutin poet (like Wordsworth, f'rinstance) would want to borrow from a genre generally associated with the “folk”?

(If you're interested in reading more about ol' Willy Wordsworth, you might want to peruse Adam Kirsch's "Strange Fits of Passion," a review article about Juliet Barker's new biography that appeared last year in The New Yorker, and/or Jonathan Rée's "The Strains of Inspiration," a review artlcle from The Nation of Adam Sisman's book on Wordworth and Coleridge, which "describes how [their] fiercely uneven relationship affected their lives and work.")

For Tuesday, February 12th (Day 7):

We're meeting in the Library--in Room 114, the classroom behind the Reference Desk, which is in the southwest quadrant of the first floor (NOT the computer lab, which is Room 121). Please try not to be late.

In your, um, spare moments when you're not beginning work on the "Lycidas" project, you may as well read ahead for Thursday (various ballads and readings about the ballad form).

And speaking of the Lycidas Project (the assignment sheet is available from the course homepage if you missed class today): I'll elaborate upon this in class next week, but my parenthetical exhortation to add to the list of terms and concepts, if necessary, may be especially relevant if you're working on some of the latter chunks of the poem. Since I was essentially compiling what y'all highlighted, and since people tended to highlight a lot more energetically at the beginning of the poem than they did at the end, the workload distribution among the groups may appear lopsided, even though every group has between 30 and 40 lines.  The third bullet under "warnings and caveats" may also be of help in this regard.

For Thursday, February 7th (Day 6):

We'll continue the discussion (about "Lycidas"--and your writing assignment about "Lycidas") that we barely started today. We'll also take up Mr. Eminent (Dead) Critic Northrop Frye's article about “Lycidas” (Course Reader) and familiarize ourselves with some terms (elegy; pastoral; pastoral elegy) in the online Glossary of Poetic Terms (see the Course Reader). Some study questions:

1. What light does Frye's discussion shed on the poem for you? Try to summarize his reading in a few sentences: what points overall is Frye making about both Milton and "Lycidas"?
   
2. Frye says, among other things, that "[i]f we ask what inspires a poet, there are always two answers....[A]n event may inspire the impulse to write. But the impulse to write can only come from previous contact with literature, and the formal inspiration, the poetic structure that crystallizes around the new event, can only be derived from other poems"; moreover, "[l]iterature often gives us the illusion of turning from books to life, from second-hand to direct experience . . .[b]ut this is never quite what happens. . . .The pretence of personal sincerity is itself a literary convention." What view of literature is he asserting here? Do you agree with it? Think back to Thom Gunn's "Words for Some Ash." Would Gunn agree, do you think?
   
3. One more extended quotation from Frye: "Every poem is inherently connected with other poems of its kind, whether explicitly, as Lycidas is with Theocritus and Virgil, or implicitly, as Whitman is with the same tradition, or by anticipation, as Lycidas is with later pastoral elegies. And, of course, the kinds or genres of literature are not separable either, like the orders of pre-Darwinian biology. Everyone who has seriously studied literature knows that he is not simply moving from poem to poem, or from one aesthetic experience to another: he is also entering into a coherent and progressive discipline." Summarize Frye's point here in your own words, and then consider: if Frye is right (is he right?), what are the implications of this for, say, your average nineteen-year-old pursuing a bachelor's degree in English?

For Tuesday, February 5th (Day 5):

See below (January 31st) if you missed the assigned reading for Thursday. For Tuesday: we finish Donne and move on to consider the speaker of the lyric poem. Read Milton's "Lycidas," available online in the Course Reader.  Your second informal writing is assignment due, too! Sit down at the keyboard for this one:

As you read, mark in some way (e.g. underline or highlight) words, terms, and concepts that you don't understand and that you suspect you need to know to "get" the poem. (Don't worry; we can talk about anything else that reading the poem provoked in your head, too. I'm taking it for granted that you'll take the same sorts of careful and reasonably extensive notes on this poem that you would do for any text you intend to spend some time with.) Bring that marked-up copy with you and hand it in along with your answers to the following questions.

1. What’s reading this poem like? Is it difficult? A stroll on the beach? (For instance, can you follow Milton's famously Latinate sentence structure?) Is this what the Russian Formalists meant by “language made strange?”
   
2. If it's difficult, what makes it so?
   
3. One of the criteria for literariness that one or two people tentatively put forth in class or on the backs of their quizzes was something like “timelessness”—that is, a text's ability to remain relevant and to continue to address concerns that we recognize as widely human. So I ask you: in what ways are “Lycidas” and its concerns “timeless”? In what ways are they not so very timeless? Try to make both cases, if you can--that is, in what ways might this poem still be Literature (assuming Literature requires timelessness), and in what ways might it have ceased to be Literature, given the criteria of endurance and continuing relevance over time?
   
4. Say the whole “timelessness” thing is a crock, anyway—that we don’t, or shouldn't, give a rat’s ass if something is “timeless” or if, like Eagleton, we simply don't believe that anything is truly "timeless." What other reasons could there be for wanting to read “Lycidas”? Are there any? Eagleton says he can imagine a time when Shakespeare might be hopelessly irrelevant; is it time to drive a stake into the heart of “Lycidas” and bid it rest in peace?
   
5. Then there’s the college syllabus question. Maybe “Lycidas” is okay if you have nothing else to do, or if you’re trapped on a desert island and this is the only thing available to read, but should it take up time on a college reading list? In the grand scheme of things, would you rather have been reading something else this weekend? Should what you want to read have any influence on what you have to read (and vice versa)?

For Thursday, January 31st (Day 4):

Sorry for the late update. We'll turn to Thomas McLaughlin and then Donne and Dickinson (all in the online Course Reader).

Also: get a jump on Helen Vendler's "The Play of Language" and "Constructing a Self" in the online Course Reader. Then consider Thom Gunn's "Words for Some Ash": how would you characterize the tone of this poem and its speaker?  What is what Vendler would call its "implied attitude," for instance?  Does the poem give you the sense of seeing through "the lens of a particular feeling"?  And what happens when you imagine yourself in the speaker's position, as Vendler suggests we must when we read lyric poetry?  Jot down some brief (or extended, if you prefer) responses to those questions and bring them to class, along with any notes and/or questions you might have about Vendler and Gunn.

For Tuesday, January 29th (Day 3):

A note, first of all: the link to the Course Reader, below, was indeed the source of the problems that several people had accessing the Eagleton piece (the link to Reader via the class homepage, however, was always working). I've fixed it--a day late and a dollar short.

Your first assignment for Tuesday is to read Robert Frost's "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" (oh no!) and work up a short analysis or interpretation of it. (This and the other assigned works are in the Online Course Reader. I'll just let you navigate back to the class homepage this time.)

Next, read the poems by Dickinson and Donne and the essay by Thomas McLaughlin on "Figurative Language." Take some reasonably substantial notes on all three (with special attention to how McLaughlin might influence your approach to the poems and/or what you ultimately make of them), and bring everything with you to class.

For Thursday, January 24th (Day 2):

1) Fill out the survey on the back of the quiz that you took with you, and bring it back, prepared to discuss it.

2) Read Terry Eagleton's “What Is Literature?” in the online Course Reader. As you read, keep track of any questions you might have to raise in class for discussion. Eagleton refers to a lot of texts and authors you’re probably not familiar with--Bentham, Macaulay, et al. It’s really not necessary to be familiar with these guys to understand Eagleton’s argument, but if you find things getting confusing at certain points jot down a note to yourself and raise your concern in class on Thursday. (Better yet: you could look it up!)

Informal Writing Assignment #1 :

1. Keep a written inventory of the different ways that “literariness” and the literary text have been defined, and the limits of those definitions. For instance, Eagleton starts out by considering “literature” as a work of “imaginative” writing—writing that is not literally true. But he immediately points out that many nonfictional texts are, in fact, generally considered today to be “literature.” So clearly “literature” can’t be confined to texts that aren’t literally true. Keep notes on the other features of “literature” that people have tried to use as a yardstick, along with the drawbacks and limitations of those yardstick, as Eagleton sees them.
   
2. Then consider your response to the quiz and the implicit (or explicit) criteria you applied. Did any of your criteria pop up at any point in Eagleton’s discussion? Did you, for instance, exclude The Joy of Cooking because it’s a text that serves an “immediate practical purpose”—that is, it’s not an example of “non-pragmatic discourse”? Or what?
   
3. After reading Eagleton, what would you now say “literature” is—how would you define the term? (Eagleton comes closest to defining literature when he calls it “any kind of writing which for some reason or another somebody values highly” (page 9), and he says that “literature” is a “functional rather than [an] ontological” term. What exactly do you take that distinction to mean?)
   
4. And finally, the Big Question: if we take Eagleton seriously, what might be the ramifications for degree programs in English? What should—or might—we study in English classes? How should we decide what we’ll study?

If you're concerned about what exactly I mean by "informal," I've uploaded a sample informal response. I responded to the first question I asked about today's quiz--how conscious were you of the criteria that you used to judge "literariness," and can you articulate your criteria?--and pretended that it was actually the prompt for an informal writing assignment. I hope this will give you some sense of the level of thinking and organization I'm looking for in your informal writing assignments.