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PROSEMINAR::NONFICTION
Semester 1
English 740 Fall 1992 / T-Th 10:30-12 / HH 1603
Ellison / 3028 Angell / 763-4639 / @UM weekdays
Office Hours: T-Th 3-4, W 1:30-2:30 and by appointment
** special proseminar office hours W 2:30-4 **
Assignments
Th Sept 10 Introduction I
Tues Sept 15 Introduction II
Due in class: a nonacademic nonfiction piece of any length up to 5
pp. You may choose any model: editorial, satire, review, letter, memoir,
essay, travel account, and so on. Bring one copy of the whole thing
to hand in. Be prepared to read the paragraph that interests you the
most aloud in class and to discuss it for five minutes. Make 14 copies
of the paragraph you plan to discuss in class.
I. ON CLOCKS AND KINGS: RESTORATION DIARIES
Th Sept 17 Pepys: Accounting for Time and Power
CP includes selections from the unabridged edition of Pepys's diary
to give an idea of what the full annotation of each entry looks like.
Strongly recommended in conjunction with this first assignment, which
deals with the minutiae of the King's return, are the last sections
of Hill's A Century of Revolution
CP: 1-15, The Diary of...Pepys; The Diary of John Evelyn ("Kalendarium");
Boyle's Meditation VIII (on clocks); selection from The Journal...of
a Thankful Christian. Shorter Pepys: Introduction; Preliminary Note;
pp. 7-53
**Sign up for "Sponsor" talks**
Tu Sept 22 Pepys's Desire
CP: Locke, "On Identity and Diversity"; Rosenwald, "Prolegomena"
Shorter Pepys: 830-1023 passim., focusing on the affair with Deborah
Willet
glance ahead to Addison and Steele: Selections, The Spectator no. 94,
where Addison quotes Locke on time
Improvs A Group
By this date you should have gone on one of the guided tours designed
to introduce you to the Graduate Library and acquired an MTS account.
II. DEAR ABBEY: RESTORATION NEWSPAPERS AND PERIODICALS
Th Sept 24 What counts as news?
CP: Sutherland, "Origins and Developments"; selections from six newspapers;
Graham, "Periodical Literature Before the Days of Queen Anne"
Tu Sept 29 News and entertainment
CP: John Dunton, Athenian Gazette; Defoe's Review; Ward's The London-Spy;
Shevelow on Dunton; Hunter, from Before Novels
Improvs B Group
III. CONSTITUTING SCIENCE
Th Oct 1 Social Science
CP: section III, complete, including Michael Hunter, "Significance
of the Royal Society" and "Scientific Community"; Sprat, selection from
The History of the Royal Society; Hunter's chapter on "Corporate Enterprise"
containing committee reports; selections from Philosophical Transactions,
and Terry Castle's article
**Bibliography Workshop**
Most of today's class will be given over to a bibliography workshop.
Do the assigned reading, focusing on Sprat, but be prepared to postpone
discussion until the next class.
Tu Oct 6 Social Science II: Pepys and the Royal Society
Shorter Pepys: entries pertaining to the Royal Society, 113, 431, 474-87,
575-88, 692-97, 780-81, 849-52, 887-900, 935, 950
Improvs A Group **"Sponsor" presentations start today**
IV. THE TATLER, THE SPECTATOR, AND THEIR PROGENY
Th Oct 8 Prose and pathos
Addison and Steele: Selections, Steele's The Tatler: nos. 1, 21, 25,
107, 132, 164, 167, 181, 271
**Bibliographies due in class today**
Tu Oct 13 Addison on empire and the fair sex
Addison and Steele: Selections, Addison's The Spectator nos. 1, 2,
10, 11, 15, 34, 37, 41, 46, 50 58, 69, 81, 88, 94, 159, 370, 555
CP: Hulme on "Inkle and Yarico"; Blair, "Critical Examinations of the
Style in no 412 of The Spectator" (skim!)
Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, pp. 11-12
Improvs B Group
Th Oct 15 Jenny Distaff's Revenge
CP: Adburgham, Women in Print, chs. III and VI; selections from The
Tatling Harlot, The Whisperer, and The Tea-Table
V. EPISTOLARY AND ESSAYISTIC MODES: LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU
Tu Oct 20 "The Converse of the Pen"
CP: from The Selected Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; Anne Herrmann,
"Introduction," "The Female Dialogic," and "The Epistolary Essay"
Improvs A Group
**paper due in class today**
**informal course evaluation**
Th Oct 22 Anonymity, Gender, and Political Commentary
CP: Spacks, "Borderlands"; Selections from Common Sense; Wortley Montagu,
Nonsense of Common Sense; Adburgham, Women in Print, ch. V
VI. AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN THE EMPIRE
Tu Oct 27 Autobiography and Gender Ambiguity
CP: Charke, A Narrative of the Life, to CP p. 736
Improvs B Group
Th Oct 29 Autobiography and Gender Ambiguity II
CP: Charke, A Narrative of the Life, to end; Moore, "`She was to Fond
of Her Mistaken Bargain': The Scandalous Relations of Gender and Sexuality
in Feminist Theory"
Tu Nov 3 "The Body of B. Franklin, Printer"
Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography pp. 1-76; also look at the material
on pp. 169-211
CP: Charvat, "Publishing Centers"; Granger, from American Essay Serials
Improvs A Group
Th Nov 5 "The Body of B. Franklin, Printer" II
Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, to end, and "Contemporary Opinions,"
pp. 231-48
CP: See the "Theory" section for Lejeune's "The Autobiographical Pact"
[recommended, but not in CP, Michael Warner, "Franklin and the Letters
of the Republic," in Representations 16 Fall 1986]
Tu Nov 10 Slavery/Mobility
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus
Vassa, the African, in The Classic Slave Narratives to p. 96; also Gates's
Introduction
[recommended in CP theory section: Jay, "American Literature and the
New Historicism: The Example of Frederick Douglass"]
Improvs B Group
**No more improvs due after today!**
Th Nov 12 Slavery/Mobility II
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, to end
[recommended in CP theory section: Homi Bhabha's "Signs Taken for Wonders:
Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi"
VIII. MANAGING LANGUAGE
Tu Nov 17 Moral authority and the essay serial
Samuel Johnson: The Oxford Authors all selections from The Rambler
and The Idler; pay close attention to Johnson's sentences. **Hand in
topic for second paper**
Th Nov 19 Didacticism and the politics of language
Samuel Johnson: on the Harleian Library, pp. 117-27; Preface and entries
from the Dictionary, pp. 307-34
CP: Smith, "The Problem"; Selections from Piozzi's British Synonymy
IX. DISCOURSES OF THE BODY: THE JOHNSON CIRCLE
Tu Nov 24 Sex and self-promotion
CP: Boswell's London Journal
Thanksgiving Break
Tu Dec 1 The body in pain
CP: Fanny Burney on her masectomy
from Piozzi's Thraliana (forthcoming)
Samuel Johnson: Diaries and letters, pp. 771-92
X. FEMININE PEDAGOGY
Th Dec 3 Teaching class
CP: More, from Cheap Repository Tracts; Barbauld, from Evenings at
Home and A Legacy for Young Ladies
XI. THEORY
Tu Dec 8 Poststructuralist genre theory
CP: Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy; Godzich and Kittay; Derrida "The Law
of Genre"
**Second paper due today in class**
Th Dec 10 Theorizing the social
CP: Bakhtin; Eagleton; Darnton
Deleuze and Guattari, "What is a Minor Literature?" (forthcoming)
Papers:
The first paper should be a close reading of a text, or some portion
of a text, that has not been the subject of class discussion. There are
two options for the second paper. Either you can propose an essay topic
and pursue it, or you can attend four scholarly lectures--hopefully with
some common thread--and reflect on these presentations or on issues raised
by them. In addition to visiting scholars sponsored by the Institute for
the Humanities, the Center for African and Afro-American Studies (CAAS),
the Women's Studies Program, the American Culture Program, and the various
humanities departments, there are campus groups like the Critical Theory
Colloquium, the Comparative Literature Brown Bag series, and the program
in the Comparative Study of Social Transformations (CSST) which present
lectures by U/M faculty. This would be a very useful exercise given the
direction of the Proseminar in the Winter Term, when we will be working
towards the proseminar mini-conference (see below, "A Brief Synopsis of
the Winter Term"). Please note that the second paper is due on December
8, before the end of the term. This will free you up for other seminar
papers, believe it or not.
Improvs: 2-page typed or printed double-spaced response papers will be
due every other Tuesday through November 19. The class will be divided
into "A" and "B" groups which will hand in improvs on alternate Tuesdays
[see syllabus]. The topic is always open but must pertain to that day's
reading assignment. Furthermore, you must comment on at least one specific
passage from that reading assignment in the course of your discussion.
You must write at least one improv that deals entirely with the sentence
structure of a particular text (See the "Style" entry of M.H. Abrams A
Glossary of Literary Terms, 5th ed.). All improvs will be graded. No credit
for late improvs--not accepted after class unless this has been negotiated
in advance.
The improvs allow for a lot of freedom and experimentation. Your style
can be informal, even freewheeling, and personal, but it must be coherent.
I like to see energetic questioning and insightful pressure brought to
bear on the texts. Always feel free to compare the assigned material to
works we have read earlier in the course or that you have read for other
courses. The improvs are an excellent source of ideas for papers.
Class Presentations: Each student will "sponsor" some portion of the
assigned reading for a given class. Each sponsor will give a 10-15 minute
oral presentation. The goal of these presentations is to stimulate discussion
and formulate critical issues. Sponsors are encouraged to relate the 18th-
and 19th-century material to the 20th-century critical and theoretical
texts assigned periodically. Be warned, however, that in some of the assignments,
there is only a suggestive relationship between the nonfiction selections
and the critical readings.
PROSEMINAR::NONFICTION
Semester 2
English 741 Winter 1993 / T-Th 1:30-3:00 / HH 2601
Ellison / 3028 Angell / 763-4639 / @UM weekdays
Office Hours: open W 2-4, by appointment Th 3-5, and by appointment at
other times if needed
Texts
Course Pack at Michigan Document Services
**All course books available at Shaman Drum only**
Cobbett, Rural Rides, Penguin (out of print; we'll use a handout)
The Portable Emerson, Viking-Penguin (more can be ordered quickly if
needed)
Emerson in His Journals, ed. Joel Porte, Harvard
The Essential Margaret Fuller, ed. Jeffrey Steele, Rutgers
Assignments
January Th 7 Introduction
I. Sensation
T 12 Affective Aesthetics: Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into...the
Sublime and the Beautiful, Parts I and II. Concentrate on "society,"
"the sexes," "sympathy," "power."
Th 14 More Sublimity: Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, Parts III-V.
Focus on the physiological and economic rationales for beauty and the
sublime, i.e. the dynamics of effort, labor, and relaxation. And read
carefully the final section of Part V, "How Words influence the passions."
T 19 Sensation and Addiction: DeQuincey, entire selection in Woodring.
Focus on "The English Mail Coach" and the selections from Confessions
of an English Opium-Eater. What is the force of "English" in these titles,
and, in the Confessions, of "Asiatic scenery"?
II. Anglo-American Culture: Getting Around
Th 21 Rustic Harangues: Cobbett, Rural Rides (xeroxed handout);
also Barrell on the prospect, in Course Pack III. What is function of
the "beautiful," as it is lost and found, in Cobbett's texts?
T 26 Surveys and Miscellanies: Edinburgh Review (Oct 1802), North
American Review (1815) in Course Pack IV, "The Reviews," along with
Jon Klancher's chapter, "Reading the Social Text." What motivates the
selection of articles in these periodicals?
Th 28 National Comparison: Martineau, 1837 Society in America in
Course Pack V, concentrating on "Economy"; Emerson, English Traits.
Chs. I-II and XVII of ET are significant for the way Emerson positions
himself relative to British romanticism, but focus on chs. IV, X, XIV-XV,
XIX , especially ch. X, "Wealth." Comparing the book to Emerson's account
of the trip in his journals, pp. 379-394, is definitely worth doing
if you have a strong interest in romanticism.
February
T 2 Race and Sensibility: Fuller, Summer on the Lakes in The Essential
Margaret Fuller, all except chapter IV, which we will read later; concentrate
on chs. I, VI-VII. Also selections from Lydia Maria Child on Indians
and women, Course Pack VI, focusing on her treatment of Native Americans.
Th 4 Choreographing Masculinity: 19c American conduct manuals for
men and Chesterfield's letters, Course Pack VII, plus the critical selections
by George Dillon, from Rhetoric as Social Action, on "Gesture and Figuration"
and Kasson, from Rudeness and Civility, on "Emotional Control." Experiment
with applying Dillon's analysis of "crisis writing" to the selections
from conduct manuals.
III. Capturing the Spirit: Modes of Abstraction
T 9 Tendencies: Hazlitt, "The Spirit of the Age," 1825, in Woodring;
Carlyle, "The Spirit of the Times" (handout will be provided). Also
the first issue of the Transcendentalist periodical, the Dial, edited
by Emerson and Fuller, in Course Pack VI. Read "The Editors to the Reader"
and the "Essay on Critics" carefully and skim the rest. What is the
relationship between "Spirit" and history in these essays? The meaning
of "criticism"?
Th 11 Feminism, Transcendentalism, Politics: Fuller, Woman in the
Nineteenth Century (skim the long Appendix) in The Essential Margaret
Fuller, and, from Course Pack VI, Fuller's Tribune article from the
series "Things and Thoughts from Europe" written for the New York Daily
Tribune (another, more legible, Tribune piece is in The Essential Margaret
Fuller). What motivates Fuller's array of allusions and quotations?
Consider also the relationship between feminine intuition and feminine
aggression.
IV. Circles, Centers, and Corporate Authorship
T 16 Conversation: Fuller-Emerson letters and Dall's accounts of
Fuller's "Conversations," excerpted from Margaret and Her Friends, in
Course Pack IX; Emerson's journals, pp. 149, 161, 172, 193, 230, 243-48,
264, 269, 302-303, 396, 409, 412-414, 418, 429, 444-45, 540, 548. (Fuller's
allegorical autobiography, "Mariana" from Summer on the Lakes, ch. IV,
in The Essential Margaret Fuller, is fascinating but optional.) Read
the two pieces by Christina Zwarg, and focus on the Emerson-Fuller dialogue.
Th 18 Mourning/Writing: Emerson, "Experience" plus Emerson's journals,
"Experience" pp. 273-360 in Porte. An essay that numerous critics, including
Sharon Cameron, Stanley Cavell, and Mark Edmundsen, have been drawn
to in recent years. I would like to focus on the transformations of
bereaved fatherhood, and the domestic economy of the writer working
at home, as these affect the essay.
Vacation
V. March-April
After vacation the format of the course will change. We will convene
once a week rather than twice. This second half of the term will fall
into three parts, all related to your research/critical projects: prospectus
presentations, our "conference," and a couple of subsequent workshops.
Proseminar members will work toward a scholarly essay (25-30 pages),
proceding from a brief presentation of their research plan, accompanied
by a 2-page prospectus, through a major oral presentation of 20 minutes,
modelled on the typical conference paper. We will stage a miniconference,
meeting in reserved conference rooms in Rackham for three weeks. Several
presentations will be given as "conference papers" at each session.
Conference papers typically run about 12 pages, so the oral presentation
should be regarded as an early, sociable version of the final paper.
We will dress up and serve refreshments. Each presentation will be followed
by 20 minutes of discussion during which every seminar member will be
expected to ask a question. The proseminar will constructthe sessions
after the prospectus presentations so that related papers are grouped
together. The three final weeks of the course will primarily be given
over to revision and completion of the essay, helped along by open workshop
sessions.
Bibliography
This list is in lieu of an immense reserve list. It is only a convenience,
not a definitive collection of the pertinent scholarship. (See also below,
"Missing Authors and Genres")
- Robert Adolph, The Rise of Modern Prose Style, 1968
- Percy Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel, 1983
- Armstrong and Tennenhouse, eds. The Ideology of Conduct
- Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,
1967
- John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place; and The
Infection of Thomas de Quincey
- Reda Bensmaia, The Barthes Effect: The Essay as Reflective Text, 1987
- John Berger, Ways of Seeing
- Wayne Booth, Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, 1974
- James Boulton, The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke,
1963
- Brodzki and Schenck, eds. Life/Lines: Theorizing Women's Autobiography
- David Bromwich, Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic, 1983
- Brooks and Warren, Modern Rhetoric, 1949
- Richard D. Brown, Knowledge is Power: The Diffusion of Information
in Early America, 1700-1865
- Brownley, Clarendon and the Rhetoric of Historical Form
- Lawrence Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 1973; New England Literary
Culture, 1986
- Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives, 1969, and Counter-statement,
1931
- Ross Chambers, Room for Maneuver: Reading the Oppositional in Narrative
- Jerome Christensen, Coleridge's Blessed Machine of Language
- John Clive, Scotch Reviewers: The Edinburgh Review 1802-15, 1957
- Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech
in Nineteenth-Century America
- David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Tudor and Stuart England
- Kenneth Dauber, The Idea of Authorship in America: Democratic Poetics
from Franklin to Melville
- Julie Ellison, Emerson's Romantic Style, 1984; Delicate Subjects:
Romanticism, Gender, and the Ethics of Understanding, 1990
- Epstein and Staub, eds. Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender
Ambiguity, 1991
- Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Race," Writing, and Difference
- Glyph 7, Johns Hopkins Textual Studies, special issue on genre theory,
1980
- Clarence Gohdes, The Periodicals of American Transcendentalism, 1970
- Claudio Guillen, Literature as System, 1971
- Hernadi, Beyond Genre: New Directions in Literary Classification,
1972
- Mary Jacobus, "The Art of Managing Books: Romantic Prose and the Writing
of the Past" in Romanticism and Language, ed. Reed, 1984
- Cora Kaplan, Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism
- Krapp, The Rise of English Literary Prose, 1915
- Berel Lang, ed. The Concept of Style, 1987
- Lanham, Style: An Anti-Textbook
- Pierre Machery, A Theory of Literary Production
- Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale [the literary world of Melville's
New York]
- Jonathan Monroe, A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and the Politics
of Genre, 1987
- Morgan, ed. Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourse: Renegotiating
Gender and Power
- Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, 1983; and
Rhetoric, Renaissance, and Technology, 1971
- Patrides, ed. Approaches to Sir Thomas Browne, 1982
- Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation
- Pritchard, Literary Wise Men of Gotham: Criticism in New York, 1815-60,
1963
- Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History
- Derek Roper, Reviewing Before the Edinburgh, 1978
- Anne Rose, Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, 1830-50, 1981
- Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and
Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America
- Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man
- David Simpson, The Politics of American English, 1776-1850, 1986
- Alice Snyder, S.T. Coleridge's Treatise on Method, 1934
- Herbert Spenser, The Philosophy of Style
- Stalleybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression
- Domna Stanton, "Autogynography: Is the Subject Different?" in The
Female Autograph, 1984
- Starobinski, Montaigne in Motion, 1985
- Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives
- Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric
- Martha Vicinus, The Industrial Muse, 1974
- Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century
Europe, 1973
- Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature
- Williamson, The Senecan Amble: Prose Form from Bacon to Collier
- Wimsatt, The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson, 1941
Missing Authors and Genres,
Or, What Didn't Fit in English 740
Missing Genres:
biography; sermons; religious pamphlets and polemics; spiritual autobiography;
medical writing; government documents; cookbooks; horticultural and agricultural
writing.
Missing Authors:
- Bancroft
- Berkeley
- Burnet
- Byron (letters)
- Chesterfield
- Crevecoeur
- de Sevigny
- de Stael
- Dickens(travel)
- Federalist Papers (Hamilton, Madison, Jay)
- Gibbon
- Hume
- Leigh Hunt
- Irving
- Jefferson
- "Junius"
- Lamb
- Lincoln
- Catherine Macauley
- Mandeville
- Mill
- Newman
- Parkman
- Pater
- Priestley
- Ruskin
- Shaftesbury
- Shelley (essays)
- Swift
- Toqueville
- Frances Trolloppe
- Walpole
- Mercy Otis Warren
- Wilde
- Arthur Young
The Configurations and Dynamics
of Nonfiction
The goal of the seminar is to keep all of these in play simultaneously.
- aesthetics; the poetic; the beautiful and the sublime; imagination
and fancy
- biography; autobiography; the history of subjectivity and intersubjectivity
- the body; eroticism; sickness and health
- economy; work; vocation; strenuosity; merit
- education and pedagogy; the formation of character and manners
- ethics; behavior; manners, conduct, and civility
- gender: social roles; invocations of the familial and the domestic;
"gender and genre"
- genre; generic codes, definitions, and "the law of genre"; heterogeneity
and intergeneric relationships
- literary institutions, markets, and the means of production: copyright
and intellectual property; periodicals; booksellers, printers, publishers;
reviewing; the lecture series; the history of the book; reading audiences
- method; logic; analysis; invocations of science and the rational;
assumptions about argument, evidence, and demonstration
- periodization: the Age of Sensibility, Neoclassicism; Romanticism--do
these categories do us any good?
- politics and revolution; ideology; hegemonic and minority languages;
hybridity, and the languages of resistance or transgression
- the sacred: evocations of liturgy, theology, or confession; epiphany,
revelation, faith
- satire, parody, irony
- style and rhetoric: periodic and nonperiodic sentences; paratactic
and hypotactic styles; paragraphing and transition; figurative language;
diction; allusion, quotation, and intertextuality
- visual appropriations: travel; descriptive writing; landscape and
the picturesque; the body; illustration; design; typography
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