ENGL 325T(S) The Place of Place in English Poetry+
Many of the most important English texts written between the seventeenth and early-nineteenth centuries are poems of "place"-forms of imaginative negotiation with specific geographical locales. London's streets and rural villages, showy mansions and modest country churches, man-made grottos and natural gardens; such places give shape and a structure of meaning to poetic consciousness, and they emblematize-in physical space-the values and conflicts that inform the imaginations of major poets. This tutorial explores the nature of poetry's preoccupation with place, and its larger implications for understanding the development of English literature over two centuries. We'll start in the seventeenth century (Jonson, Milton, Marvell) and end with the romantics (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge), but focus primarily on such eighteenth-century poets as Pope, Swift, Thomson, and Gray. We'll also consider-at least briefly-how developments in philosophy and visual art (e.g., landscape painting) shaped attitudes toward place. Topics may include: the role of poetry in constructing the conflict between urban and rural values as the industrial revolution overtakes England; the choice writers increasingly face between their need to live in the protected space of poetic "retirement" and their desire to engage in social and political controversies; the rise of "the sublime" as a poetic value; and, more generally, the shifting attitudes toward consciousness, language, and society that marked the literary tradition's evolution from classicism to romanticism. (More detailed information about the content and design of this course is available on the English Department's website: http://www.williams.edu/English/INDEX.HTM) Requirements: Students will meet with the instructor in pairs for an hour each week; they will write a 5- to 7-page paper every other week (five in all), and comment on their partners' papers in alternate weeks. Emphasis will be on developing skills not only in reading poetic texts, but also in constructing critical arguments and cogently responding to them in written and oral critiques.
Prerequisite: a 100-level English course, except 150 (formerly 103). Enrollment limited to 10. (Pre-1800).