Dr. White's
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Instructional
Materials

terms index

Model Assignments

Instructor: Craig White      Phone: 281 283 3380.       Email: whitec@uhcl.edu

Office: Bayou 2529-8      Office Hours: M 4-7, T 4-7, & by appointment

Course Policies

Attendance policy:
One free cut permitted without comment or penalty;
more than one absence jeopardizes your status in course.
If you continue to cut or miss, drop the course.
Even with medical or other emergency excuses,
high numbers of absences or partial absences
result in a lower or failing course grade.

Midterm & Research Proposal
(11 October)

Research Options

research essay (due 16 November)

research journal (due 16 November)

2 research posts
(19-24 October & 16 November)

Conference Proposal & Presentation
(due 16 November)

Final exam
(due 6-7 December)

Student Presentations

reading discussion leader

poetry reader / discussion leader

web / outside text review

Romanticism: My Reading

Tuesday,  23 August 2016: introduction

Readings:

Walt Whitman, "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer"

Rita Dove, "Golden Oldie"

Emily Dickinson, [I Cannot Live with You]

Agenda: intro, schedule, discussion

syllabus, discuss Romanticism

midterm, presentations, model assignments

ID & preferences, assignments

[break]

self-introductions

lyric poetry (review poetry presentation)

preview next week's readings

Walt Whitman, 1819-92

Self-Introduction

Name? Degree or course of studies? What stage in graduate career? Professional or vocational application of studies?

What do you know (or guess) about Romanticism? American Romanticism? Which writers would you automatically associate?

Discussion Questions:

1. What is Romanticism & why does it matter? Where have you encountered the word before, with what associations?

2. What is Romantic about each poem? Presence of Romance narrative? Non-Romantic or anti-Romantic elements

Tuesday, 30 August 2016: identifying Romanticism

Readings: Poe, Ligeia (1838, 1845) (gothic)

Emerson, selections from Self-Reliance (1841) & The Over-Soul (1844) (Transcendentalism)

reading discussion leader(s): Michael Osborne (Poe); Umaymah Shahid (Emerson)

poetry: Walt Whitman, "There was a Child Went Forth" (1855)

poetry reader / discussion leader: instructor

web / outside text review: Genesis & Letters of Columbus

reviewer: instructor 

Agenda: website, presentations (handouts)

course objectives, periods

Emerson: Umaymah (Self-Reliance)

Poe: Michael

review discussion-leader assignment > poetry-reader assgnmt

Whitman:

course arrangement, next week's assignments

Genesis & Columbus as Romanticism and Romance?

Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-83

Discussion Questions:

1. What conventions, subjects, narratives, and forms of Romanticism are identifiable in either or both texts?

2. What differences between Emerson and Poe? How may they both be Romantic writers or stylists?

3. What appeals to readers then and now? Why does Poe remain the most popular of American classic writers, while Emerson remains essential to the traditional canon of American literature?

4. How is Poe's or Emerson's Romanticism essentially American—or not?

5. Guidance: identify Poe with the gothic, Emerson with Transcendentalism, but look for the sublime & the romance narrative in both.

Question(s) for Whitman poem:

1. What familiar Romantic elements? Romance narrative? Where does Whitman exceed Romanticism or veer into Realism?

2. How does Romanticism affect poetic form? (Whitman as founder of free verse; effort to write poetry for common people)

Tuesday,  6 September 2016: early American literature anticipating Romanticism

Readings:

John Smith, from A General History of Virginia (1624)

Mary Rowlandson, Narrative of the Captivity & Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682) (captivity narrative)

Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741), A Personal Narrative, & Note on Sarah Pierrepont (The Great Awakening)

Thomas Paine, from The Age of Reason (1794) (Enlightenment period) (Declaration, U.S. Constitution)

reading discussion leader(s): Jessica Myers (Edwards &/or Paine); instructor (Rowlandson &/or Smith)

poetry: Anne Bradstreet, "To my Dear and Loving Husband" (cf. E.B. Browning, "Sonnets from the Portuguese #43")

poetry reader / discussion leader: Caryn Livingston

Agenda: presentations, rationale

periods

gothic and sublime

Edwards & Paine

Bradstreet: Caryn

[break]

captivity narrative

Discussion: on Smith and Rowlandson

Gothic in Smith (15), Rowlandson (0.3a; 7.1)?

assignments

terms: romance narrative, captivity narrative, Romantic rhetoric

fanciful depiction of
Mrs. Mary Rowlandson

Discussion Questions for Pre-Romantic texts:

1. What roots or prototypes for Romantic forms in today's readings? How may these prototypes evolve or develop in Romantic era and beyond? What resistance to reading these texts as proto-Romantic?

2. Compare Edwards (and Paine) to Emerson, Poe, Whitman, Dickinson of Romantic era (a century or more later). A common comparison-with-continuity is between Edwards as a late Puritan and Emerson as a Romantic Transcendentalist.

3. How does Paine's Deism anticipate Transcendentalism? (+- Unitarianism)

4. Smith's and Rowlandson's texts are genre-identified as captivity narratives, one of America's unique contributions to world literature. How may the captivity narrative conform to the romance narrative? (Or not?)

4a. How does the captivity narrative experience differ for a man (Smith) and a woman (Rowlandson)?

5. Re Pocahontas in Smith's History of Virginia, how has this legend been increasingly romanticized ever since, up to the Disney animovie? What elements in Smith's story encourage or resist romanticizing? In what cases is Romanticization a direct violation of factual truth? Or is Romanticism another kind of truth or reality akin to myth?

Tuesday, 25 October 2016: American Renaissance of Women's Writing

Readings: Susan B. Warner, selections from The Wide, Wide World (1850) (read chs. 1, 2, 5, 6, 10)

Maria Susanna Cummins, selections from The Lamplighter (1854)

Harriet Beecher Stowe, selections from Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851-2) (chs. 1, 4, 7, 9) 

reading discussion leader(s):  (Warner &/or Cummins); Umaymah Shahid (Stowe)

poetry: Elizabeth Bishop, "The Fish"

poetry reader / discussion leader: Caryn Livingston

Agenda: conclude Jacobs?

Warner & Cummins: instructor

[break]

Stowe: Umaymah

poetry: Caryn

Discussion Questions:

1. Wide, Wide World (1850) was the USA's bestselling novel until Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851-2), and both were outsold by The Lamplighter (1854). How do these texts resemble or differ from modern popular literature?  What are the continuing attractions of domestic literature? What are these popular novels' strengths and weakness for critical study and teaching?

2. As with the slave narratives, where does Romanticism give way to Realism, with what literary satisfactions or frustrations?

3. Evaluate sentiment & sentimentality—how to react to scenes of tears, mothers' fears, etc.? How does Uncle Tom's Cabin combine domestic sentimentality with political activism? Compare Thoreau's Resistance to Civil Government; backgrounds to civil disobedience.

4. How does Uncle Tom's Cabin correspond in form and content to the slave narrative genre?

5. If you've read John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678), how does Wide, Wide World resemble it, particularly as a type of spiritual romance?

6. All these texts were written in the context of the "Second Great Awakening" of American evangelism in the early 19th century. Evaluate the evangelical content in today's readings. How to teach such texts in a public school or university? How much do the texts succeed as cultural history or as literature? How do evangelical values correspond or not to Romanticism?

7. Compare Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as an example of how domesticity and the slave narrative meet.

Tuesday,  1 November 2016: Romanticism in Realism

Readings: Henry James, Daisy Miller (1878): Part 1 & Part 2

reading discussion leader(s): Caryn Livingston

poetry: Theodore Roethke, "I Knew a Woman"

poetry reader / discussion leader: Stephen Defferari

Agenda:

assignments

periods as subject of literary studies (Realism)

Daisy Miller: Caryn

poetry: Stephen

Henry James, 1843-1916

Background: James (w/ Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, & William Dean Howells) is a leading author of the American period / style of Realism—in James's case "psychological realism." Realism as a movement reacted against Romanticism but retained features that may still seem residually Romantic..

Daisy Miller, James's most popular work, appears in 1878, a long decade after the Civil War. Culturally, Realism may appear as a period of comparative exhaustion or retrenchment following the enormous social movements and changes of the antebellum era and Civil War. Compare 1960s-1980s.

Discussion Questions: 1. How have setting, characterization, and narrative (incl. romance) changed since the Romantic era? Or not?

2. If both Romantic and Realistic elements co-exist, what is the effect of their mixing or friction? Consider irony, but other possibilities.

3. Note the story's repeated references to Lord Byron (1788-1824). How does the story manipulate elements of Romanticism and turn them to Realistic ends?

4. Consider the character Daisy Miller as a new American woman visiting Europe but uninhibited by gender or class traditions of the Old World. How does Daisy's image conform to styles or values of Romanticism? How does her voice challenge such descriptions or motives? What actions throw characterization of her as Romantic into question or doubt?

5. Henry James is critically regarded as one of the USA's greatest authors and inspires enormous quantities of scholarship yearly. What is his status in the literary canon? What appeals or detractions? How is Daisy quintessentially American? Why is Randolph surprised that Winterbourne is an American? (James's "International Theme.")

5a. Compare James's style and psychological content to Hawthorne?

5b. Daisy Miller as novel of manners?

6. Jessica's question: Why must Romantic heroines who rebel agains society invariably die? (e.g. Edna in The Awakening [1899])

Tuesday,  8 November 2016: local color / regionalism

Readings: Charles W. Chesnutt, "The Goophered Grapevine" (1887)

Sarah Orne Jewett, "The White Heron" (1886) & "The Town Poor" (1890)

reading discussion leader(s): Jessica Myers

poetry: Mary Oliver, "Wild Geese"

poetry reader / discussion leader: Caryn Livingston

Agenda:

Local color, Realism & Romanticism

discussion: Jessica:

[break]

poetry: Caryn

schedule > Modernism

Sarah Orne Jewett
1849-1909

Discussion Questions:

1. The Local Color movement, a.k.a. Regionalism, was concentrated in the Realistic period of the late 19th-early 20th centuries. Identify Realistic features of these stories' style, but what Romantic styles or values remain?

2. Local Color writers typically represent speech in dialect, which is now discouraged by editors, publishers, and creative writing teachers. Why the change? Why did dialect work then but not now?

3. Local Color writing is often appealing to readers but overlooked as a major movement. Why is it attractive but critically neglected?

3a. Women read and wrote much of the Local Color movement. What are its appeals to an audience of women, and how may it represent a feminist voice or tradition?

4. By this point in the semester, rehearsing period or style terms like Romanticism and Realism may seem obvious, but what usefulness do such broad terms serve for scholarship and teaching? Scholarship is so specific that broad terms like Romanticism and Realism or even Regionalism may rarely be examined in depth except in reference works like Handbooks, Encyclopedias, and Companions—but secondary scholarship often refers to such terms.

Tuesday, 22 November 2016: Modernist Romanticism

Readings: William Faulkner, "A Rose for Emily" (1930)

Katherine Ann Porter, "The Grave" (1935)

Thomas Wolfe, The Lost Boy (1938)

reading discussion leader(s):  Caryn Livingston

poetry: Sylvia Plath, "Blackberrying" (1960)

poetry reader / discussion leader: Liz Davis

terms: Modernism, Symbolism, symbol

Agenda:

schedule, final class preview

periods: Modernism

Impressionism

fiction:

poetry: Liz

Katherine Ann Porter
1890-1980 (born at
Indian Creek, Texas)

Discussion Questions:

1. How has Romanticism been absorbed or transformed as Modernism? How does Romanticism recognizably survive by adaptation to Modernist needs? What does Modernism add to or subtract from Romanticism? What styles in these stories are identifiable as Modernism? (Consider stream-of-consciousness narration, symbolism, primitivism, sexuality.)

2. These stories retain Realistic elements or forms. Where do the styles of Modernism, Romanticism, and Realism (incl. Local Color) meet or separate? (These major styles also meet in Modernist fiction by Fitzgerald and Hemingway.)

3. Both "A Rose for Emily" and "The Grave" refer directly to African American characters. Are these references patronizing sentimental stereotypes, or meaningfully realistic and symbolic?

4. In what ways does Faulkner's writing here and elsewhere qualify as "Southern Gothic?" What other authors might be included in this category?

5. Overall, how has Romanticism changed across a century or more? Is Romanticism still recognizable in the heroic sprawl of Modernism? What parallels between Romanticism and Modernism? Is Modernism an evolution or a radical break from Romanticism and Realism? How may Romanticism appear in current literature, either as postmodern "literary" literature or as popular or genre literature?

Tuesday,  29 November 2016: Jazz Age / Harlem Renaissance (continue Modernism)

Readings: F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Winter Dreams" (1922)

Claude McKay, "Harlem Dancer," "Harlem Shadows," "If We Must Die"

Langston Hughes, "Harlem" & "Dream Variations," "I Too Sing America," "Jazzonia," "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "Night Funeral in Harlem"

Zora Neale Hurston, "How it Feels to be Colored Me"

reading discussion leader(s): Michael Osborne (Fitzgerald); Stephen Defferari (Harlem Renaissance)

poetry: Tracy K. Smith, "I Don't Miss It" poetry reader / discussion leader: Jessica Myers

web / outside text review: Countee Cullen, "Yet Do I Marvel"; "From the Dark Tower"; "For a Poet": instructor

Agenda: final exam

Harlem Renaissance: Stephen

Tracy K. Smith poem: Jessica

[break + evaluations]

Fitzgerald: Michael

Hughes, Cullen questions (exam C3, C4)

Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald

Discussion Questions:

Fitzgerald, "Winter Dreams": 1. If Fitzgerald is a Modernist with a Realistic surface, how do he and this text continue to represent a romance narrative or a Romantic perspective? How much is Fitzgerald's persona, mystique, or perspective not Romantic but merely American? How has Romanticism changed in the century since its peak?

2. How does Judy Jones resemble Daisy Miller as "the American Girl" and subject / object of romance? (Or Cora in Mohicans, Poe's Ligeia, Jacobs's slave girl, Sylvia in "White Heron," or Miranda in "The Grave?")

3. If Americans can't talk about class, how does Fitzgerald bring us near to the subject? Compare "class" as identity-determinant with race and gender?

Harlem Renaissance writers: 4. What is Modernist yet resiliently Romantic about these writers and their texts? How do they inherit, capitalize on, and transform Romantic styles or subjects in ways compatible with Modernism?

5. As with the slave narratives, how does including African American literature stress and test the limits of Romanticism? Should minority traditions be mainstreamed or separate but equal?

Tracy K. Smith poem: If Smith is a postmodern poet, how has Romanticism changed, attenuated, or revived?