Victorian Poetry

E392M, 31987, Fall 03,  Jerome Bump

TTH 1230-2 in PAR 102; office Par 132

Office hours TT 10:45-12:15 and by appointment

Course Web Site: http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~bump/E392M/

email: bump@mail.utexas.edu; Office phone: 471-8747, home: 267-7884

 

 

            The basic critical assumptions about the Victorian period and its poets will be surveyed, but (in response to an initial survey of those who have pre-registered) we will focus at first on Hopkins, the Brownings,  Tennyson, Arnold, the Rossettis, Swinburne,  Meredith, Morris, Wilde, Mary Coleridge, Hardy, and the early Yeats, with some consideration also of  George Eliot, Emily Bronte, and Kipling.  We will  also explore the relation between the verbal and the visual arts in the second half of the 19th century, focusing particularly on the Pre-Raphaelites and their drawing, painting,  and design, and on how their movement inspired Aestheticism, Impressionism, and Imagism.

            Our discussion of poetics will include the sonnet, the quatrain, the ode, the Romantic lyric, the pastoral lyric, the temptation poem, the narrative poem, the dramatic monologue, pastoral and other elegies, and the grotesque.  Imagery will be analyzed in detail, especially  wordpainting, metaphor, analogy, simile, personification, metalepsis, the pathetic fallacy, mythological allusion, deep parody, antiparody, and various kinds of symbols. Our discussion of the sound stratum of poetry will include onomatopoeia, mimesis of motion, anapestic, iambic, and sprung rhythm, alliteration, assonance, and rhyme.

            In general, the critical approaches we test, like the poems we read and the themes we pursue, will be determined by students' needs and interests, but our approaches will include Bloom's revisionist criticism as applied to the Victorians' use of metalepsis; Tennyson's temptation poems and reader-response criticism; Browning's dramatic monologues and NeoAristotelian genre criticism, and Christina Rossettiπs poetry and gender criticism.  Students will also be introduced to the possibilities of scholarly publication offered by  the Humanities Research Center collections and the internet.

            Students can write about any British primary texts they choose written between 1830 and 1914 in relation to whatever literary theories or critical approaches they choose to explore. Students will have the option of writing two ten-page essays, three seven-page essays, four five-page essays, or making web sites. At times we may use networked computers to achieve more collaborative class discussion and provide more feedback about writing projects.  80% of the final grade will be based on the writing, 20% on class participation.

         Texts: The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory [Author: Collins, Thomas J et al.  Publisher: Broadview Press] and   a collection of xeroxes to be purchased at Jenn's, 2000 Guadelupe [473-8669].