Syllabus

Daniel Lupton
English 125, Section 002
Spring 2011
Email: dlupton@email.unc.edu


Office: Greenlaw Hall 307
Office Hours: MWF 10:00-11:00


Course Description

This course is designed to train students in a variety of different methods for approaching, interpreting, discussing, and writing about poetry. Students who have struggled with poetry in the past will appreciate that this course assumes no prior expertise. We will start, quite literally, at the beginning, breaking down the often-mystifying task of reading and understanding poetry into a series of simple, fundamental questions. Students who are already comfortable reading and writing about poetry will appreciate the chance to experiment with the numerous and diverse methodologies that we will study this semester. By approaching the study of poetry as both a skill (an activity you can learn or be trained in) and an art (an activity that invites creativity and invention), I hope that students with an extremely wide array of interests, skills, talents, and life experiences will enjoy and profit from the course.

Unit 1: Approaches to Poetry
Reading a poem for the first time can be a disorienting, intimidating, and ultimately discouraging experience. More often than not, though, the difference between experienced and inexperienced readers of poetry is simply that the experienced readers know how to ask the right kinds of questions. In this unit we will develop strategies for reading and re-reading poems, strategies that can get us around the barriers—obscure or archaic language, unfamiliar forms, unconventional syntax—that stand in the way of our appreciation of poetry. We will develop this set of questions (which students will continue to refer to throughout the rest of the course) through a close examination of a wide variety of lyric poetry from the Middle Ages until the 20th century.

Unit 2: Studies in Genre and Historical Criticism: The Romantic-Era Sonnet
In Unit 1 we looked at poems largely outside their historical and literary contexts, concentrating on what those poems have to say to us as 21st-century readers. However, investigating these contexts is extremely important in modern literary scholarship, and can help even the casual reader gain a richer, fuller appreciation of a poem. In Unit 2 we will examine a number of sonnets from the first half of the 19th century, investigating how these poems fit into both the political and historical context of their own time as well as the sonnet’s centuries-old poetic tradition. As in Unit 1, we will work together to determine what types of historical questions are “on the table” for literary scholars as well as what research tools and methods scholars use to answer these questions.

Unit 3: Longer Narrative and Philosophical Poetry
In our final unit, we will apply the strategies and techniques we have learned over the course of the semester to two longer works of narrative and philosophical poetry: Wordsworth’s The Prelude and Lord Byron’s Don Juan. These longer poems resemble lyric poetry in the density of their language and their reliance on traditional poetic forms and techniques, but their narrative structures and modes of argument also require their readers to approach them in way normally reserved for prose, fiction or drama. As we read and discuss these poems, we will think about how the approaches to lyric poetry we have studied this semester can also inform our interpretation of both narrative poems like Don Juan as well as novels, essays, and other types of literature that may be considered “poetic,” but not “poetry.”

Required Texts

Vendler, Helen Hennessy. Poems, Poets, Poetry : An Introduction and Anthology. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, c1997.

Feldman, Paula R., and Daniel Robinson. A Century of Sonnets : The Romantic-era Revival, 1750-1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Byron, George Gordon., T. G. Steffan, and E. Steffan. Don Juan. London ;: Penguin Books, 2004.

Wordsworth, William, Mark L. Reed, and Jonathan Wordsworth. The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850 : Authoritative Texts, Context and Reception, Recent Critical Essays. New York: Norton, c1979.

Grading / Assignments

Blog posts: 15%
Participation and quizzes: 15%
Paper #1: 15%
Mid-term exam: 10%
Creative Response project: 15%
Paper #2: 20%
Final exam: 10%

Attendance Policy
Your attendance at each class meeting is essential; this course is as much about discussing poetry as reading it, so in order to reap the full benefits of the course you will need to attend class regularly. Any student who accumulates more than 6 unexcused absences will fail the course (note: the only absences that will be counted as excused are those in which you are traveling on behalf of the university). Persistent tardiness may also affect your grade.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is defined as the unattributed or unacknowledged use of another’s words or ideas and is a breach of the honor code. If I suspect you of a willful violation of the honor code, I will report you to the honor court. See your Student Guide for further information on plagiarism.

The Writing Center (http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/)

Students are encouraged to visit the UNC Writing Center (located on the lower level of Phillips Annex). The tutors at the writing center will work with you one-on-one through problems or concerns about any stage of the writing process and can provide useful feedback between in-class draft workshops. Please note that the writing center tutors will not edit or proofread your papers.