TTh 1:10-2:30 |
G239 AH 1:10-2:30 |
Eric Rabkin |
764-2553 & esrabkin@umich.edu |
Office: 3243 AH |
TTh 3:10-4:00 & W 2:00-4:00 & By Appt |
This prerequisite to the English concentration
is open to anyone interested in developing a richer understanding and
enjoyment of poetry. No special background in literature is required
for registration, but we will begin immediately to consider matters
of poetic form (such as stanza structure, rhythm, and meter), diction
(such as word choice, etymology, and sound), content (such as poems
of love or war, the uses of allusion, and philosophic issues), and
rhetoric (such as metaphor, irony, and symbolism). While studying X.
J. Kennedy's An Introduction to
Poetry (8th edition; available at
Shaman Drum, 313 S. State), which contains mainly English-language
works from the Renaissance to the present, we will converse
vigorously and work cooperatively toward developing widely applicable
analytic, evaluative, and writing skills. Written work includes a
daily reading journal, a 2-3 page paper on a single poem, a 3-4 page
paper on at least two poems, and a 4-5 page paper on a single author
or a single type of poem. Please do all work by the dates indicated
in the syllabus below.
Th 9 Jan |
Introduction: review syllabus; make class roster; use Introductory Notes |
T 14 Jan |
XJK iii-14 (front matter, including Contents, and Reading a Poem) & reread syllabus |
Th 16 Jan |
XJK 15-41 (Listening to a Voice) |
T 21 Jan |
XJK 42-67 (Words) |
Th 23 Jan |
XJK 68-77 (Saying and Suggesting) (begin reading for 28 Jan) |
T 28 Jan |
XJK 481-512 (Writing About Literature & Writing About a Poem) |
Th 30 Jan |
XJK 78-93 (Imagery) |
T 4 Feb |
XJK 95-113 (Figures of Speech); paper 1 due in class |
Th 6 Feb |
XJK 115-131 (Song) |
T 11 Feb |
XJK 132-152 (Sound); paper 1 returned in class |
Th 13 Feb |
XJK 153-172 (Rhythm) |
T 18 Feb |
XJK 173-192 (Closed Form); optional revision of paper 1 due in class |
Th 20 Feb |
XJK 193-213 (Open Form) |
T 25 Feb |
XJK 214-225 (Symbol); revisions of paper 1 returned in class |
Th 27 Feb |
XJK 226-241 (Myth and Narrative) |
T 11 Mar |
XJK 242-260 (Poetry and Personal Identity); paper 2 due in class |
Th 13 Mar |
XJK 261-270 (Alternatives) (begin reading for 18 Mar) |
T 18 Mar |
XJK 271-302 (Evaluating a Poem & What Is Poetry?); paper 2 returned in class |
Th 20 Mar |
XJK 441-452 (Criticism: On Poetry) (begin reading for 25 Mar) |
T 25 Mar |
XJK 513-543 (Critical Approaches to Literature) |
Th 27 Mar |
XJK 303-323 (Whitman through Chaucer) |
T 1 Apr |
XJK 324-345 (Chesterton through Hall) |
Th 3 Apr |
XJK 345-369 (Hardy through Keats) |
T 8 Apr |
XJK 369-388 (Larkin through Nemerov) |
Th 10 Apr |
XJK 389-408 (Niedecker through Salter) |
T 15 Apr |
XJK 408-423 (Shakespeare through Tennyson); paper 3 due in class |
Th 17 Apr |
XJK 423-440 (Thomas through Yeats); student evaluation |
T 22 Apr |
Last class day; paper 3 returned in class; course summary; reading journals with self-evaluation due in class |
Th 1 May |
1:30-3:30 Reading journals returned in office |
USING X. J. KENNEDY'S
INTRODUCTION TO POETRY
Our syllabus assigns the reading of virtually
all of this volume to be read by specific dates. There is one
significant exception, the biographical sketches of the poets (XJK
455-478). These should be consulted whenever appropriate as you
read.
Please note that Kennedy provides many
questions and exercises. You certainly should use these to spur your
thinking but please feel no compulsion to actually write out answers
to or fulfillments of any of these unless you wish. We will see that
although Kennedy's is a generally excellent text, we will sometimes
want to direct our critical attention differently or even reject
Kennedyís assertions and implications. Read Kennedy with an
open, engaged skepticism. He is good, but he does not have access to
absolute truth. Indeed, in matters of poetry, often there is no
absolute truth, so learning to construct persuasive truth oneself is
crucial to appreciating poetry.
Also, I want you to know that I have the
"Instructor's Edition" of Kennedy's textbook. This edition includes a
number of materials not found in your edition, including three items
that you may want to consult: a) a listing of authors represented in
the book by more than one poem with the number of included poems for
each author noted; b) a fourteen-page listing of all the poems in the
book distributed under nearly sixty "subjects" and "themes"; c) an
eight-page listing of all the poems in the anthology section of the
book arranged according to the "elements" of a poem on a
chapter-by-chapter basis corresponding to "elements" (chapters 2-16)
in the book. Please feel free to consult my copy in class or in my
office if you think that it may help you in finding further reading
and/or in deciding on materials for a paper.
USEFUL SECONDARY SOURCES
In reading literature, it is often helpful to
have some specific background information. Sources I often use
include:
Word Dictionaries
Morris, William, ed. American Heritage Dictionary for pictures and etymologies regardless of source language.
Oxford English Dictionary (1st and 2nd editions) for historical change in meanings.
Partridge, Eric. A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English.
Joseph T. Shipley, Origins of English Words: A Discursive Dictionary of Indo-European Roots for underlying etymological connections.
Stein, Jess, ed. Random House Dictionary of the English
Language (Unabridged 1st edition) in
general and for proper names.
Symbol Dictionaries
Cirlot, J. E. A Dictionary of Symbols.
Cooper, J. C. An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Traditional Symbols.
Mercatante, Anthony S. Facts on File Encyclopedia of World Mythology and
Legend.
Mythology Guides
Atwater, Donald. The Penguin Dictionary of Saints.
Davidson, H. R. Ellis. Gods and Myths of Northern Europe.
McKenzie, John L., S.J. Dictionary of the Bible.
Rose, H. J. A Handbook of Greek Mythology.
Zimmerman, J. E. A
Dictionary of Classical Mythology.
Quotation Finders
Bartlett, John. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.
Wright, Charles H. H. Cruden's Handy Concordance to the Bible.
Literature Handbooks
Drabble, Margaret. Oxford Companion to English Literature.
Hammond, N. G. L. and H. H. Scullard. Oxford Companion to Classical Literature.
Hart, James D. Oxford Companion to American Literature.
Poetry References
Williams, Miller. Patterns of Poetry.
Myers, Jack and Michael Simms. The Longman Dictionary of Poetic Terms.
Preminger, Alex and T. V. F. Brogan, eds.
The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry
and Poetics.
Internet:
The English Department home page
(http://www.umich.edu/~engldept) maintains a web page of "Resources
for Readers and Writers": http://www.umich.edu/~engldept/deptdocs/resources.html
You may want to bookmark both URLs.
WRITTEN WORK
Each student in this class is asked to keep a
journal and to write a series of short papers.
Reading Journals: As understood in this course, a reading journal is a
type of diary by means of which you focus your thoughts on the
reading material, record references to key passages, articulate
questions that the texts seem to raise, and sometimes try out answers
to those questions. The reading journal should be kept in some sort
of permanently bound, 8-1/2" x 11" notebook, such as a spiral-bound
notebook, with your name and the course number prominently displayed.
You should make entries in your journal for at least three poems from
each class day's assigned reading. You may make entries for more
poems from the assigned reading or from additional relevant reading
within or without the course text. A typical entry should be headed
with the date of entry and objective data about the text, such as the
author's name, the title of the work, the birth and death dates of
the author, the language, nationality, and gender of the author, and
the date of publication of the work. You should leave some space
after these preliminaries since after reading the work you might want
to add other heading information, such as an indication of the type
of work this is (for example, ballad or satire) or an indication of
other works that seem particularly interesting to associate with it
and the reasons for those associations (for example, similarity of
narrative structure or of theme). As you read, of course, you ought
to mark your texts, not only underscoring key words or passages but
indicating in the book's margins why those passages are key or at
least what they contain (for example, "central image" or "thematic
reversal"). In your reading journal you may want to record those
comments by page and line number and amplify them. The process of
writing as one reads often leads to promising stray thoughts that one
doesn't want to forget but doesn't want to stop reading to pursue.
These stray thoughts should also go in the reading journal. At least
as important as the stray thoughts are the thoughts that arise after
the reading (and often, with poetry, multiple rereading) is complete
and one has had a chance to digest the work a bit, both by reflection
and by looking back through it and through one's marginal notes. At
that point, you ought to write down your observations about anything
in the poem that seems interesting (for example, style,
characterization, setting, tone, moral, and so on) indicating whether
those observations feel conclusive or provisional. If provisional,
you ought to try to frame questions that might test those
observations. And if you then find answers, they should be added too.
If you have not yet done so, at that point you should also indicate
pages and lines on which important passages may be found, be they
important for framing or answering the questions in the entry or
simply important as examples of something that you find striking.
Each such reference should be accompanied by a few words indicating
your idea of the passage's importance. These ideas, like all ideas in
the reading journals, should be thought of as susceptible to revision
as discussion, further reflection, and further reading suggest new
understandings of individual poems and of literature in general.
Entries should be made with very wide margins so that these second
thoughts and later cross-references to other works noted in the
journal can be made clearly and conveniently. A typical entry, then,
will have heading information, a section of comparatively unorganized
notes made during reading, and a section of somewhat more organized
observations made after reflection and review of the text and of the
beginning of the journal entry.
In addition to thoughts on individual works
made before, during, and immediately after the reading (and
rereading) of each text, the reading journal should also record your
more general observations and questions about poetry and your
specific discoveries about etymology, allusion, and other
extratextual matters.. These observations and discoveries may well
serve to focus class discussion and/or to lead you to your own paper
topics.
By writing in the reading journal, you focus
your ideas. Once written, those ideas can be shared and developed
with others. At the beginning of each class, you should exchange your
journal with a classmate. You should read your classmate's reading
journal entries for the material for that day and then make a written
response to one or more of those entries. Your response might comment
on the virtues or weaknesses of each entry as a self-teaching tool;
it might try to offer an answer to one or more of the questions
posed; it might pose new questions in relation to the observations
presented; and it might try to help in the development of such
general ideas as possible paper topics. You should sign clearly the
comments you make in your classmate's reading journal. During the
course of the semester, you should try to get written comments from
as many of your classmates as possible. Each day, after you retrieve
your journal and have had a chance to read your classmate's written
commentary on your entries, we can begin class discussion of the
texts indicated on the syllabus.
This journal should be your record not only for
the material listed by title on the syllabus but for all other
reading work you do in this course. You should make journal entries
here for research you may do in secondary texts to illuminate the
poems and for reading you may do to widen your knowledge of a poetic
type or an author. You should take your class notes right in the
reading journal too. This makes your own review of your progress in
the course easy. Whenever you do review, feel strongly encouraged to
write cross-referenced further thoughts in your margins and to add
new observations, ideas, and questions wherever they seem appropriate
or at the end. Date all such additional entries for reference.
And if you care to try your hand at original
poetry, please feel free to include that as well.
Since your reading journal will be read by
others, please make sure to write very clearly or to print.
Given the nature of the entries, fragment sentences may well be quite
reasonable, but illegible words are not. The typical entry for a poem
probably should be no more than a handwritten page. You should leave
at least a third of a page after each entry both so that your
classmate has room to write and so that you have room to jot further
notes based on that response and/or on class discussion. I will look
over your shoulders and comment on these journals in class each day.
When the journals are turned in to me on the last class day of the
semester, they should be accompanied by a typed, thoughtful
evaluation of the use the journal was to you. Please number the pages
in your journal so that your own cross-references can be made easily
and so that this self-evaluation can make concrete references to
examples in your journal. The self-evaluation should include a
suggestion of the reading journal grade you believe you ought to
receive and your reasons supporting that belief.
Papers: There
will be three papers due for this course, each on a topic you choose,
with my help if you wish, within the following scheme: a 2-3 page
paper on a single poem (paper 1), a 3-4 page paper on at least two poems (paper 2), and a 4-5 page paper
on a single author or a single type of poem (paper 3). Please consult
with me as you choose materials about which you intend to write. For
the first paper, since you may not yet have a firm sense of yourself
as a writer and of our class as an audience, I offer the option of a
revision for those papers that seem to me to have been vigorously
attempted. If you want to revise, please consult me for approval.
Revisions should be submitted with their first evaluated version.
All papers should be headed in the
upper-right-hand corner with the name of its writer, the date the
paper is due, the course and section numbers, and the total number of
words. For the purposes of this course, all pages must be
double-spaced. I take a ìpage" to be between 250 and 300
words, so paper 1 should be 2-3 double-spaced pages and be between
500 and 900 words, paper 2 should be 3-4 double-spaced pages and
between 750 and 1200 words, and paper 3 should be 4-5 double-spaced
pages and between 1000 and 1500 words. Papers that fall outside the
required length and word limits will be penalized, just as fifteen
line sonnets would be. We all need to learn to write to fulfill the
expectations and demands of given writing situations.
Each paper should aim to enrich the reading
of an intelligent senior in the class.
This means that through your reading of the poetry, your
participation in class discussion, and your secondary researches
where appropriate, you should become expert in literary matters that
particularly interest you, be they matters of technique, theme,
genre, or what have you. For each paper, generate a hypothesis
concerning some such matter, or a set of related matters, concerning
at least the poetry we have already read for class. Test the
hypothesis against the poem(s) in order to confirm it, modify it, or
discard it as necessary. Once you have a hypothesis you believe would
be valuable to a classmate who had also read the poem(s) but had
happened to be working on other matters, draft your paper so as to
present that hypothesis clearly and
persuasively. Where appropriate,
paraphrase and/or quote from the poem(s). Use page and line
references in parentheses. Do not, however, make your
paper mere summary. The intelligent senior already knows what
happened in the poem(s); you are trying to add to this knowledge by
revealing the significance and/or subtlety of the poetry's meaning or
technique. Reread your draft with the
eyes of a potentially dissenting reader and revise to meet any
legitimate objections. Constructing
appropriate paper topics is a crucial aspect of your development as a
reader and writer. Please feel warmly invited to consult with me as
you do this or at any other stage in your research and writing
process.
Plagiarism: I
regret that experience compels me to deal explicitly with the issue
of plagiarism. I endorse the standard definitions: "submitting a
piece of work (for example an essay, research paper, assignment,
laboratory report) which in part or in whole is not entirely the
student's own work without attributing those same portions to their
correct source" (LSA
Bulletin, 1993-1994, p. 44); "the
appropriation or imitation of the language, ideas, and thoughts of
another author, and representation of them as one's original work"
(Random House Dictionary of the English
Language, Unabridged edition, 1966).
With the exception of knowledge which is demonstrably common (for
example, 2 + 2 = 4) or whose source is demonstrably well known (for
example, "To be or not to be"), material submitted without citation
is normally presumed to have originated with the submitter.
Therefore, work or parts of a work submitted without citation will be
construed as having been submitted as originating with the submitter.
If it appears that uncited work did not originate with the submitter,
the work will be turned over to the LSA Academic Judiciary for their
determination as to whether or not plagiarism has occurred. The LSA
Judiciary exacts diverse penalties for plagiarism, up to and
including permanent expulsion from the University. Plagiarism, then,
is a deeply serious matter. It strikes at the core values of an
institution designed to promote individual achievement in large part
through the free and honest exchange of ideas among us all. I welcome
all efforts you may make to learn. It is quite normal, for example,
to talk with colleagues about one's ideas and to consult such
secondary sources as language dictionaries, symbol dictionaries,
bibliographies, biographies, concordances, and so on. It is less
usual among undergraduates to consult secondary sources such as
critical articles, but such consultation is certainly legitimate.
However, remember that the aims of the writing assignments are a) to
prepare you for class; b) to make you a better reader; c) to make you
a better writer; and d) to make your own contribution to the
education of the group. In order to achieve those aims, you must do
original work.
COURSE GRADE
The grade for this course will be based on a
simple computation: 15% for paper 1, 20% for paper 2, 25% for paper
3, 20% for the reading journal, and 20% for participation (both
inside class and, if appropriate, outside class).
I take the grade of C to be "adequate," that
is, the work fulfills its purpose with its
audience
in a manner that is adequate both in form and content. If either the
form or content is excellent, that raises the work one letter grade
in range; if both are excellent, that raises the work two letter
grades in range. If either the form or content is inadequate, that
lowers the work one letter grade in range; if both are inadequate,
that lowers the work two letter grades in range. Since extended work
is rarely of uniform quality in form or content, I adjust grades
using pluses and minuses. Since assigning grades to work of the sort
required by this course is no simple, mechanical process, I will
gladly discuss the grades with you if you like but only within the
week after the work has been returned. I will, however, always be
willing to discuss your ideas, writing, and literature with you both
inside class and in my office.
Obviously the interplay of journal exchange and collaborative give-and-take is impossible for those who are absent. Therefore, for the purposes of arriving at a participation grade, I will take attendance daily. However, mere attendance will not determine the participation grade. Daily attendance is expected; the high quality of one's participationóas questioner, answerer, and listeneróis what I most hope to see as we all work together with these rich works of art.