English 365: 19th-Century
British Poetry and Prose
Fall 1999
Overview
During the semester I will expect you to maintain
a written record of your responses to our course materials and concerns in the
form of an ongoing collection of reading notes. I will collect these from you
at several points during the semester, on the dates indicated on the reading
list, and will in each case return them at the next class meeting with my own
brief responses to your notes, including any suggestions I may have about ways
to improve or otherwise modify them. Please note that these notes will constitute
20% of your overall course grade.
Because we cover a considerable amount of literary,
historical, and cultural material during the duration of this course, it is
important that you keep up-to-date notes on the reading and thinking you are
doing with the assigned materials, both on their own and in relation to our
work together as a class. The required reading notes offer a good way of helping
you to think creatively and systematically about these matters, one that will
help you to develop a coherent view of the literary and cultural history of
Great Britain in the nineteenth century.
These notes will also provide a good source of
preliminary material for the course research project you will complete, and
which you will develop in consultation with me as the semester proceeds.
Format
You should maintain (and submit) your reading
notes in some sort of notebook form. Either a standard spiral or a loose-leaf
binder will do; if you work with a computer and printout, the latter is the
obvious choice. I suggest that you set your notes up in a double-page format,
as follows.
On the left side of the double
page, makes notes on the daily reading assignments. These notes should include
your responses to any or all of the assigned readings for the day. You may wish
to record your initial reactions to and interpretations of the readings themselves,
as well as any thoughts about them that may have occurred to you on subsequent
rereadings. You may wish to speculate in your notes about how any or all of
these readings relate to subjects, themes, and other considerations we have
been exploring in the course. Or you may wish to write some about how they relate
to your own personal and professional interests and skills. I do, however, expect
that your notes will be primarily critical and interpretive,
and not just a superficial and impressionistic series of comments about whether
or not you "like" particular works.
On the right side of your double-page,
make notes about the relationship of the assigned readings to the outside
reading you are doing for this course and for any other framework that is relevant
to your personal and professional work (connections to things you are reading
for other majors, for instance, or for your individual personal development).
The emphasis in these right-hand-page notes should be on the "big picture" you
are developing about nineteenth-century British literature in relation to other
historical, cultural, critical, and theoretical conetxts. Here you should be
writing about how your other, outside reading helps you make greater sense of
the materials you are reading for this course.
There is no set format for these notes, nor is
there any particular "right" way to do them. I will expect each of you to find
a format that "works" for you while satisfying this part of the course requirement.