Syllabus - Practical Course in Text Interpretation

Alex Ciorogar

Course description:

- the course will be using a student-oriented approach to a number of poems

considered representative of the Romantic movement
- the course will cover canonical authors from the end of the 18th and the beginning of
the 19th centuries
- the course should represent an introduction to Romantic writing, as well as a detailed
study of critical methods
- the course will involve students in the process of reading, thus developing their
interpretive skills
- the course will also represent an introduction to some of the contemporary theoretical
discourses
- the course will be based on a reader-response framework
- the course will also function as an introduction to the study of poetry as a genre
(ballad, ode, epic, elegy)
- the course will historically contextualize the close reading of the texts with details
concerning the Pre-Romantic and Romantic periods
- the course will present the main characteristics of the Romantic movement
- the course will offer information with regards to the religious, economic, political,
and social conditions of the age

Teaching Objectives:

- to accustom students with the practices and languages of critical thinking

- to familiarize students with the methods of literary criticism
- to accustom students with the concept of close reading
- teaching students how to adequately contextualize a literary text
- to discuss the poetical conventions of the Romantic period
- to provide information about the writers, texts, and currents of the studied age

Skills Being Developed:

- the ability to annotate and interpret a literary text (poem)

- knowing and utilizing critical instruments and concepts
- contextualizing the studied poems within the limits of the literary conventions of the
18th and 19th centuries
- elaborating convincing arguments and discourses on the studied texts

Teaching Methods:

- interactive discussions

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 - class debates
- student-oriented speeches which explain and discuss the theoretical frame provided
by the secondary reading list
- team work
- eliciting personal responses
- individual and group presentations
- interpersonal communication
- stimulation of critical thinking
- reflective learning
- close-reading
- brainstorming
- dialogues

Bibliography:

- William Wordsworth
- “Lyrical Ballads”, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”
- “The Prelude”
- William Blake
- “Songs of Innocence”
- “Songs of Experience”
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
- “Kubla Khan”
- George Gordon, Lord Byron
- “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”
- “Don Juan”
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
- “Prometheus Unbound”
- “Ode to the West Wind”
- John Keats
- “To Autumn”
- “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, “Ode to a Nightingale”

Teaching Materials:

- classroom, hand-outs, images, photocopies, books, audio-video installation

Course Outline:

- Week 1: introductory class

- presenting objectives and requirements; introducing the general theoretical
frame of the practical course, authors and texts to be studied and methods or critical trends to

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be used; definitions of Romanticism; the appearance of Romanticism; the two generations of
Romantic poets; the schools of Romantic poetry
- Topic: radical and conservative Romantics; Preromantic schools of poetry;
the persistence of neoclassical themes and forms; talent and genius; the cult of the poet
- Keywords: folklore, history, Bard, imagination, fight against empiricism,
freedom, sensibility, sentimentality, subjectivity

- Week 2: William Wordsworth - Lyrical Ballads, Tintern Abbey

- Topic: The Preface or The English Romantic Manifesto, poetic diction,
reaction against Neoclassicism, the three revolutions, expressive theories, Lake School of
Poetry
- Keywords: democratic revolution, simple language, plain style, the new
definition of poetry and the poet, natural language, prosody
- Students’ tasks: reading the texts and contributing to class debates

- Week 3: William Wordsworth - The Prelude

- Topic: spiritual autobiography; the subjective epic; the egotistical sublime;
blank verse; the sublime
- Keywords: nature, landscape, meditation, growth, development, life-writing,
description, pantheism, transfiguration, metaphysical, spirit, imagination, individualism
- Students’ tasks: reading the text and contributing to class debates

- Week 4: William Blake - Songs of Innocence

- Topic: freedom, imagination, mysticism, symbolism, allegory, mythopoeic,
prophecies, Bard, visionary
- Keywords: The Bible, Christian symbology, innocence
- Students’ tasks: reading the text and contributing to class debates

- Week 5: William Blake - Songs of Experience

- Topic: illuminated printing, states of the human soul, revolution, experience
- Keywords: atheism, sublime, symbolic mental landscapes, Gnosticism,
esoteric knowledge
- Students’ tasks: reading the text and contributing to class debates

- Week 6: Samuel Taylor Coleridge - The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

- Topic: supernatural, lyrical ballad, Gothic, vision
- Keywords: albatross, guilt, redemption, destiny, imagination, medievalism
- Students’ tasks: reading the text and contributing to class debates

- Week 7: Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Kubla Khan

- Topic: vision, dream, fragment, description, supra-rational, idealism
- Keywords: psychology, power of imagination, prophecy
- Students’ tasks: reading the text and contributing to class debates

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 - Week 8: Lord Byron - Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
- Topic: Romanticism as a cultural pose; the Byronic Hero
- Keywords: cultural construction, travelogue, fame, Spenserian stanza
- Students’ tasks: reading the text, contributing to class debates; mid-term test

- Week 9: Lord Byron - Don Juan

- Topic: satire, anti-romantic hero, ottava rima, irony, cynicism
- Keywords: Romantic Hellenism, return to Antiquity, tragic, satiric, comic
- Students’ tasks: reading the text and contributing to class debates

- Week 10: Percy Bysshe Shelley - Prometheus Unbound

- Topic: Shelley's skepticism; innovation; poetry as the supreme literary form,
allegory and symbolism
- Keywords: mythology, proto-socialism, idealism, skepticism, materialism,
archetype, solitude
- Students’ tasks: reading the text and contributing to class debates

- Week 11: Percy Bysshe Shelley - Ode to the West Wind

- Topic: Satanic School of Poetry, Neoplatonism, materialism, elegy,
imagination
- Keywords: inspiration, freedom, agnosticism, melancholy, hope, rhapsodic
intensity
- Students’ tasks: reading the text and contributing to class debates

- Week 12: John Keats - To Autumn

- Topic: aesthetic turn, luxurious sensations, organicism, disinterestedness
- Keywords: invocation, art for art's sake, beauty, truth, intensity, synesthesia
- Students’ tasks: reading the text, contributing to class debates

- Week 13: John Keats - Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale

- Topic: art vs. reality, dreams, tensions between opposite principles, visual
sensations, Cockney School
- Keywords: ekphrasis, odes, inspiration, negative capability, excellence
- Students’ tasks: reading the text and contributing to class debates

- Week 14: conclusions and feed-back - final paper submission

Evaluation Methods:

- the final grade consists of:

- 15% - the score of a mid-semester test
- 30% - class participation
- 55% - the score of the final paper

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 - the final paper is an essay which will interpret one or more of the studied texts using
one of the analytical methods which were studied

Organizational Details:

- students are expected to attend at least half of the delivered seminars

Bibliography (secondary reading list):

- Abrams, M.H., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, W.W.W. Norton, 2000
- Alexander, Michael, A History of English Literature, Palgrave Foundations, New
York, 2007
- Bloom, Harold, (ed.) Romanticism and Consciousness. Essays in Criticism, W.W.W.
Norton, NY, 1970
- Boris Ford (ed.), From Blake to Byron. The Pelican Guide to English Literature,
Vol. V, Penguin Books, 1982
- Burwick, Frederick, Romanticism. Keywords, Wiley Blackwell, Oxford, 2015
- Day, Aidan, Romanticism, Routledge, NY, 1996
- Ferber, Michael, Romanticism. A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 2010
- McCalman, Iain, An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age. British Culture 1776 -
1832, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999
- Rawes, Alan (ed.), Romanticism and Form, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007
- Stuart Curran (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, CUP, 2003
- Wu, Duncan (ed.) Romanticism, A Critical Reader, Oxford, Blackwell, 1995