ENGLISH 211: English Literature Beowulf to Dryden

John Dryden (1631-1700)   "The Wanderer" MS (c. 965)  Aphra Behn (1640?-89)

Section .01 / Fall 2011
Instructor: Arnie Sanders [Click here for all course web pages, CV, recent research, etc.]
Department of English, Goucher College Office Hours, 11:30-12:30 MW, and by appointment  Page last updated: 12/04/2011 05:09:30 PM

Recent site news--12/4/11: Franz Lidz, "Upstairs, Downstairs and in Between," WSJ Magazine (December 2011) 106-113.  Are you ready for a little Wild Kingdom footage of the English aristocracy on their home turf?  Read this short, bizarrely sympathetic (it's the Wall Street Journal's weekend magazine!), and profusely illustrated article to see the 21st-century fate of the "World" which Congreve's play describes.  Note especially the frequent references to Charles II and the Restoration as a sort of reference point for the last "good old days" of this culture, and the frequent references to later eras as times of gross violations of the social taboos which hold together this peculiarly indolent and petulant social class and its astonishing (and decaying) possessions.  Does this help to explain what Mirabell does to Mrs. Fainall because he needs two fortunes, not just a fraction of Millamant's money, to sustain the lifestyle to which they've become accustomed?  Or what Fainall is attempting to do, with the law and the sword, in pursuit of the same aims?

Congreve's The Way of the World (1700) is a paradoxical representative Restoration comedy for the Norton.  It flopped and ended Congreve's career.  Other Restoration comedies are far easier to follow and had more successful stage runs (arguably a measure of public influence), such as William Wycherley's The Country Wife (1675--protag. "Horner" spreads word he's impotent so that men will trust him with their wives) and Sir George Ethredge's The Man of Mode (1676--protag. "Dorimant" said to be based loosely on Rochester).  But this play, occuring near the end of the fashion for flippant satire of conventional mores and social misbehavior, offers a great slice of London society.  We see a townhouse ruled by a wealthy widow (Lady Wishfort) who could give the Wife of Bath some addled tips, two competing "rakes" or London aristo playboy-schemers, a sort of "female academy" of the tea table wherein women (and privileged male guests) discuss "reputations," a fully developed servant caste whose members play important roles in the plot, and a multi-generational country vs. city family complete with the citified college boy (Witwoud) and his neredowell friend (Petulant) and his country cousin Sir Willful Witwoud whose manners and speech and lack of literate learning mark him as the last age's hero.  To read a slightly exasperated but adulatory review of a local D.C. performance, click here.  But note he got some crucial facts wrong--no wonder because it's such a complex plot.

Link to In-Class Performance Schedule

16-17 Authors in Time: Who Was Alive When, and What Was Published in their Lifetimes?

   I'll leave the link to the "authors in time" page on this home page until the end of the semester so that we can continue to take the "survey" part of the course seriously, linking genres and ideas and authors over time.  Note that we are solidly into the "print" publication era, although manuscript circulation continues as a sort of pre-print medium for literary creation.  When does print become the "sign" of authorship--as in, "how do you know you are an author unless you can get someone to print your work"?  What does it mean to continue to circulate your work in manuscript in such a  era?  What are the modern forms of "manuscript circulation," or do you actually still circulate handwritten poems, stories, etc. among your friends?                     

          If you are considering taking either English 240 (Medieval Literature) or English 215 (Critical Methods) in Spring 2012, you can see a a previous syllabus and other materials here: http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng240;  http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng215/.

Poetic "Feet" Terms    Poetic Meter Terms    Rhyme Scheme in Stanzas    Stanza Structure

http://estc.bl.uk/F/?func=file&file_name=login-bl-estc  The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC)

        For the bibliographic research extra credit option for those who want to raise their Class Participation grade and/or are interested in working with rare books, see the "Getting to Know Some Old Things Very Well" project over-view page and the attached links.  Twice during the semester, over a period of about 3 weeks each, students may make appointments to study specific rare books relevant to the course in Special Collections and produce a short investigative paper describing what they have found.  Extra credit will be added to the Class Participation grade before the final grade is calculated, and it is negotiable by discussion with the instructor.

General research tip:  If you know how to use a concordance, try Mitsu Matsuoka's concordance site at Nagoya University (Japan) that covers nearly all our authors in the second half of the semester, plus rather a lot from 212.  Here's the URL--bookmark it against future need!: http://victorian.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/concordance/  If you do enough close-reading analysis, sooner or later you should want to see how and where your author used specific key vocabulary in other works.

Two general pieces of information:

        From your friends at the Academic Policies Committee of the faculty:  "Academic Honor Code: Reference to the academic honor code is required of all course syllabi as a reminder to students.  Suggested wording includes: Reminder: All students are bound by the standards of the Academic Honor Code, found at www.goucher.edu/documents/General/AcademicHonorCode.pdf."  Consider it done, folks.  I, Arnie Sanders, believe that you would sooner submit to amputation than let another's words be passed off as your own, because you recognize that literacy gives you a chance to make your words live forever, or at least for as long as people read the language in which you write them.  Nevertheless, I also have noticed more casual cut-and-paste theft of unacknowledged sources in freshman writing, so if you are a sophomore and did not unlearn that habit in freshman composition, be forewarned that I will detect it and be deeply disappointed as I try to decide whether you intentionally committed "mugging-by-plagiarism" of another author or are merely badly trained.  (The former cases go to the Honor Board and the latter get only one chance to make amends by submitting a revision, after which they will be watched carefully for relapses.)  More worrisomely, students are increasingly content to cite sources long after their prose has begun to borrow ideas from those sources.  That is technically plagiarism, too, but it has become so common that I must spend gallons of ink and hundreds of keystrokes un-teaching it.  Never make me guess whose ideas I'm reading.  Cite sources when you first depend on them.  I want to know how well you can think, not how well your sources can think, which is a matter of historical record for anyone who reads them.  Let there be a bright line of fire between ideas that are originally yours and those of other writers to which you refer.  One last reminder: you have to cite primary sources and list them in your Works Cited section, especially now that you might be using either the 7th or 8th edition of the Norton.

         If you are a rising sophomore and if you believe you want to major in English, you also should register for English 200 this fall to prepare yourself to write for the major.  It is not a prerequisite for English 211, but students who have taken or are taking 200 have a significant advantage in 211 over those who have not. 

Course Description

        English 211 introduces you to British authors, works, genres, ideas, and movements which will help you understand the development of the English language and its literature from its earliest inceptions to the emergence of Modern English in mass market print production. During this period, English culture was transformed from a small group of feudal kingdoms, each based on landed wealth controlled by a hierarchical aristocracy and the church, to a single nation-state ruled by a parliamentary government and based on an international capitalist trading empire that reached from the Appalachian Mountains of North America to India in the East. For English majors, the course's emphasis on the "big picture" will provide essential context for interpretations of works studied at greater length in upper-division courses. For non-majors and majors alike, the course offers the chance to explore your language's heritage in the works of its most influential and talented writers.  Our goal is to surrender to these texts long enough to experience their effects upon an audience of competent readers, and to separate ourselves from them with enough insight to detect the strategies by which they subjected us to "the dream of the text."

        Before the first class meeting, please read the "Syllabus View" and  "Bottom Line" pages to see how the course is constructed and what graded work will be considered for the final course grade.  Read the "Text Book Purchases" page for important advice if you are going to buy the books early and read ahead.  If you are worried about how to remember and understand what you read for the course, click here for my single best  piece of advice about how to study.  To understand how the syllabus was constructed and English 211's main goals for its students, read this historical overview of the course's readings and this rationale for why you should care about this course.  These three short descriptions of Old English (the language of the Anglo-Saxon tribes in England), Middle English, and Early Modern English also will  help you understand the course's historical/linguistic "flow."  Around Thanksgiving of each semester, we finally break through into Modern English when reading literature produced during and after the English Civil War (1642-59).   You would do well to read a bit about what distinguishes "modern" mentalities from "pre-modern" ones.  It's a huge cultural and psychological leap.

        The Norton Anthology has included women writers only in the comparatively recent history, and women writers still are under-represented in typical print surveys of early literature.  Click here for the Brown University Women Writers Project:  (Goucher College users only--subscription account.) You can find additional works by early women writers at the Emory Women Writers Resource Project at Emory University's Lewis H. Beck Center.

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