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Introduction to English Studies
ENGL 3000/Fall 2003

"Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible."
W. H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand

"Consummation is the hurry of fools, but Expectation the Elixir of the Gods."
Emily Dickinson, Prose Fragment 69

Booksâ€”Introductionâ€”Requirementsâ€”Gradesâ€”Attendanceâ€”Calendar

Required Texts:

Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse
Stanley Kunitz, The Collected Poems
Anne Carson, Glass, Irony, and God
Alice Munro, Open Secrets
Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
August Wilson, Joe Turner's Come and Gone
Ian McEwan, Amsterdam
Bel-Jean Course Packet

The books are available at the Tate Union Bookstore and, in smaller quantities, at the Baxter Street bookstores and at Borders in the Alps Road Shopping Center. The large lecture meetings of this class, as well as the Friday discussion sections, will revolve in great measure around our collective reconsideration of passages from each book as we come to it on the course calendar. Without the book in hand, you will find yourself unable to follow the artist's words closely and reflectively in class and unable to draw on particularly vivid or moving passages around which to organize your papers. Most, if not all, of these titles may well exert the kind of special claim on your loyalty that will lead you to include them in your personal library. For all these reasons, it is important that you buy the books promptly.

If you do not already own a good dictionary, consider buying the latest edition of the Merriam-Webster collegiate dictionary in one volume or the two-volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Our course web page contains a link to the on-line Oxford English Dictionary that you can use from computers on the university network, but electronic dictionaries are no substitute for having actual volumes in which to browse. You may find, over the course of the term, that you would like to own a grammar reference work of some kind as well. The Tate Union Bookstore stocks a selection of these.

A course packet of essays is available at Bel-Jean Copyprint on Broad Street, including work by Donald Justice, Paul Fussell, Robert Alter, Walter Benjamin, and E. M. Forster. These shorter pieces are required reading for our class. I will weave them into the calendar of assignments below and, to some degree, build suggestions for papers around them. Each essay is an intriguing performance in its own right, related to the genres of informal memoir and lecture represented on the syllabus by Anne Fadiman and by Borges. They should remain useful to you outside the boundaries of this class.

Introduction to the Course

Jorge Luis Borges, whose six lectures on the literary imagination form a textual muse for this class, suggests late in his little book that an awareness of the history of literature "is really a form of unbelieving, a form of skepticism" (114). Rather than structure his own approach to writing and reading by employing the customary tools of historical period, of genre, or of national origin, Borges points to what he considers a "braver" course: that we "allow perfection to art without taking into account the dates." In ENGL 3000 this fall, we will try to take Borges's advice. The guide to which we will appeal, as we address this challenge, is Auden's least fallible of critical companions: pleasure.

This course will not draw on the structural principles that organize the rest of the English Department curriculum. The large social forces and significant ideas that may shape your course of study in future English classes are secondary to our main focus for the next fifteen weeks: the exercise and the refinement of our collective capacities to allow perfection to art.

Specialized reference books like The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms (edited by Ross Murfin and Supryia M. Ray) or M. H. Abrams's handbook A Glossary of Literary Terms, now in its seventh edition, collect and organize the professional vocabulary of literary study. You may find such resources useful later in your major. But for our investigation of the complex pleasures of reading the chief tools you will require are those with which most prospective English majors are already equipped: curiosity, generosity, and imagination. Writing and reading are inherently generous acts--attempts on the part of both the artist and the audience to cope with the psychological, cultural, and temporal isolation of human life. Over time, your descriptive powers will help you to distinguish successful from unsuccessful attempts, superficial consummation (as Emily Dickinson puts it) from the genuine elixir of expectation.

When Socrates complains, in the Phaedrus, that one cannot hold a dialogue with the written word, he touches on a central paradox of literary art. Confronted with questions posed by a curious reader, writing can only mindlessly repeat itself from within the prison of the printed (or written) page. How can the subtle emotional dialogue of "life" be made to reside in a written thing? How can a verbal mechanism be said to live? This question touches directly on what Borges calls the riddle of poetry, and we will no more pretend to answer it, in this class, than Borges does in the lectures that comprise This Craft of Verse. But over the course of the semester, we will enrich our collective experience with what Borges aptly terms "the happiness of the reader," and acquire greater facility in describing the forms which such happiness takes in the distinctive modes of poetry, drama, and prose.

Beginning with The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz and the work of the Canadian classicist, Anne Carson, we will first turn our attention to what one might call the physics of poetry: its exploitation of visual, metric, and sonic energy in the service of verbal beauty. "Conservation of energy is the function of form," Stanley Kunitz writes, sounding very much like an artistic Isaac Newton in the brief reflections that introduce his book. With the assistance of Borges, Donald Justice, and Paul Fussell, we will explore the unique forms of written energy known as poems.

From this grounding in lyric immediacy, we will move on to the extended temporal experiences of drama, memoir, and fiction: work in which time is both a medium and a subject. At each stage in the journey through the syllabus, you will practice your facility at doing what Socrates suggested could not be done (though his pupil, Plato, clearly disagreed): holding a dialogue with the written word.

Requirements

-Eleven brief papers due on the dates indicated in the course calendar below.
-Consistent attendance at weekly lectures and thoughtful participation in discussion section meetings.
-A final essay exam: Monday, December 15, 8-11 AM, Park Hall 265

Papers must be typed, double-spaced, in a 10 or 12-point font that will allow for roughly 250-300 words to appear on a full typed page. No electronic paper submissions will be accepted. For the reasons discussed in the section describing grades below, no late papers will be accepted.

Submission of a paper in this course indicates your permission that the paper may be duplicated and used for the purposes of an editing workshop either in the large lecture class or in a discussion section. Whenever we use student writing for instructional purposes, the author's identity will be concealed. From time to time, additional student papers, with or without editorial comments, will be added to this website in order to increase your exposure to and experience with the editorial process.

If for some reason you would prefer that a particular paper not be considered for workshop use, please attach a note to the paper indicating your desire. The teaching assistants and I will respect your wishes.

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The final mark you receive for the class will be determined by your performance on the assigned papers, by your lecture attendance, by your active engagement in the Friday discussion sections, and by the final exam.

The first three papers will be ungraded. They will, however, be marked. The teaching assistants and I will offer quick impressions of the accuracy and the elegance of your prose in an effort to help you gauge the level of polish that you will need to bring to bear on your written work. These editorial responses will not aim to provide a comprehensive audit of a paper's errors or weaknesses. They will function as guides to the progressive enhancement of your own editorial powers on future papers. Feel free to make conference appointments with either your teaching assistant or with me when you need additional commentary on a paper that we have returned to you. In cases where a student fails to submit one of the initial, ungraded assignments, the paper will be recorded as an F.

The grades you receive beginning with the fourth paper assignment will not be averaged at the end of the term. No single paper counts for more, or for less, than any other. I do not attach percentages to the paper grades or to the final exam when I determine your grade for the entire course. Each student's performance tends to describe a unique trajectory over the fifteen-week term. The teaching assistants and I are interested in identifying the highest level of accomplishment that you are able to attain in your writing, and in determining how often in the semester you were able to hit that mark. Very strong work in the last three or four written assignments will more than counterbalance very shaky results in the early weeks of the term, particularly when the written work is accompanied by an exemplary performance in discussion section meetings. Your teaching assistant's account of your commitment to the Friday discussion meetings may result in a final mark for the class that is a full letter higher than your papers alone might warrant.

Part of the reason for having you write so much and so often in this class is to make it less likely that two or three uncharacteristically weak papers will have a disproportionate effect on your final grade. At the same time, the frequency of the writing assignments in this class, and the corresponding compression of our grading time, means that we will not be able to accept late papers.

We will not impose a seating chart in the large lectures. By the second week of the term, you will be responsible for contacting your TA before the beginning of the lecture so that he or she can record your presence. As the term progresses, the teaching assistants may elect to post clearly labeled copies of their section rolls at various points around the lecture room so that you can put your initials beside your name to record your presence. These rolls will serve as our record of your lecture attendance. Each TA will establish an attendance mechanism for Friday discussion sections as well.

Calendar

8/18 Introduction to the Course. Begin reading Stanley Kunitz, The Collected Poems. Over the first four weeks of the class, we will read all of the roughly 150 poems in the Kunitz collection--many of them many more times than once--but under no circumstances should you approach this reading goal as you might approach the task of reading a novel. Read between thirty and forty poems a week, beginning with the selection that Kunitz has made from his first volume, "Intellectual Things." Break that number down, too, into six or seven poems a day, allowing some time each day to re-read your favorites, as you accumulate a list of favorites.

Don't neglect the collection of aphorisms that Kunitz has provided as a preface to his book. Look too at the "Aphorisms" section of this syllabus, including the technical terms that it contains, and see if this scrapbag of words and ideas is helpful to you as you think about, and write about, Kunitz's work.

Read the first lecture in Borges's This Craft of Verse: "The Riddle of Poetry."

8/20 You should be at least half way through the selection from "Intellectual Things" by today's lecture. By Friday's discussion section meeting, plan to be starting on the first three or four poems from "Passport to the War." Read Borges's second lecture, "The Metaphor."

8/22 Section Meetings.

8/25 Assignment One is due. If you have been able to get Kunitz's book, your reading should have carried you through the poems in "Passport to the War." Keep checking the Tate Union shelves and the shelves at FTX Bookstore on Baxter Street. Begin the course packet by reading Donald Justice's two essays: "Of the Music of Poetry" and "Benign Obscurity." Justice, you will find, is something of a skeptic when it comes to claims about poetic "music" and "meaning." The Academy of American Poets maintains a web page with some additional information on Kunitz. You can visit it by clicking here.

8/27 Visit from the Undergraduate Coordinator's Office/Introduction to the English Department. Continue reading through the poems from "This Garland, Danger." In This Craft of Verse, skip for the time being "The Telling of the Tale" and read the fourth and fifth lectures: "Word-Music and Translation" and "Thought and Poetry."

8/29 Section Meetings.

9/1 Labor Day Holiday--No class. Reading, on the other hand, never takes a holiday. You will need to be making progress in the poems from "The Testing-Tree." Continue working through the course packet, paying particular attention to Paul Fussell's "The Technique of Scansion" in order to get some idea of how to examine the metrical side of poetic language. The "Aphorisms" section of the syllabus contains a brief digest of some common terms that Fussell introduces, but see for yourself how Fussell makes use of them.

9/3 Assignment Two is due. Continue reading in Kunitz's selection from "The Testing-Tree" and "The Layers." In the course packet, read Robert Alter's chapter on "The Difference of Literature."

9/5 Section Meetings. Read the last lecture in the Borges series, "A Poet's Creed."

9/8 Since this is the last full week we spend on Stanley Kunitz, you should be reading the selections from "Next-To-Last Things" as well as continuing to re-read favorite poems from the earlier sections of the book. Now that you are steeped in Kunitz's work, you might enjoy reading an interview with him, entitled "I Am Not Done With My Changes." Since this document is a pdf file, you may want to print it out in order to read it comfortably. Click here.

9/10 A final lecture on Kunitz.

9/12 Section Meetings/Assignment Three is due.

9/15 Today we conclude our discussion of Kunitz, though not (I hope) your interest in him. Begin reading Anne Carson, Glass, Irony, and God. Be sure, as you approach the first long poem in her book ("The Glass Essay") that you read Guy Davenport's very informal and very tentative introduction. Do you think Davenport is helpful or meddlesome?

9/17 As you read "The Glass Essay," turn to Borges's third lecture, "The Telling of the Tale." Consider how many stories Carson has decided to weave into this long poem/essay/memoir.

9/19 Section Meetings/Assignment Four is due.

9/22 Before reading (and rereading) Carson's briefer poems in "The Truth About God" and "TV Men," skip to the end of the book and read carefully her essay on "The Gender of Sound." Does the essay suggest any ways of approaching the poems? If you have access to a computer with speakers, you can visit a web site maintained by the Lannan Foundation to listen to recordings of Carson reading a few poems and participating in an interview. Click here and scroll down until you come to the entry on "Carson."

9/24 Begin the second of Carson's long narrative poems in her book: "The Fall of Rome: A Traveller's Guide."

9/26 Section Meetings.

9/29 Assignment Five is due. This is our last week on Anne Carson's poems. Read "Book of Isaiah" and return to "The Glass Essay" or to some of the short pieces that may have seemed enigmatic when you first encountered them.

10/1 Lecture

10/3 Section Meetings.

10/6 Assignment Six is due. We will approach Alice Munro's Open Secrets by focusing on two stories a week, beginning with "Carried Away" and "A Real Life." You can read a fairly recent interview with Munro, conducted by The Atlantic Monthly, by clicking here.

10/8 Lecture. Read Walter Benjamin's essay "The Storyteller" in the course packet. It is a long, episodic piece, so you may want to read it section by section over the next two weeks as you grow more familiar with Munro's work.

10/10 Section Meetings.

10/13 The stories for this week are "The Albanian Virgin" and "Open Secrets." Assignment Seven is due in the lecture meeting.

10/15 Lecture

10/17 Section meetings.

10/20 Read "The Jack Randa Hotel" and "A Wilderness Station" for this week.

10/22 Lecture

10/24 Section meetings. Assignment Eight is due.

10/27 This is our final week on Munro. Read "Spaceships Have Landed" and "Vandals."

10/29 Lecture

10/30 Fall Break begins. No Friday discussion section meetings on the 31st.

11/3 Begin Anne Fadiman's essays in Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. The individual pieces are short, so we will read four or five for each class meeting over the next week. For today read from "Marrying Libraries" through "Never Do That to a Book."

11/5 Read "True Womanhood" through "The His'er Problem."

11/7 Section meetings. You should be making progress toward "Nothing New Under the Sun" in the Fadiman collection.

11/10 You should have finished Anne Fadiman's collection over the weekend, as well as finishing Assignment Nine, which is due today.

11/12 Begin August Wilson, Joe Turner's Come and Gone. In interviews Wilson cites the collages of the Harlem Renaissance artist Romare Bearden as an influence on his plays. You might give some thought to the analogy between collage and theater. For a look at some of Bearden's work, follow the links to the holdings of several museums (including the High Museum in Atlanta) by scrolling down on this site.

11/14 Section meetings.

11/17 Continue with Wilson's play.

11/19 Lecture. A visit from CHA Visiting Artist Kunal Basu. He will talk informally on the topic of "Writing Across Cultures" and will certainly invite your questions and comments on his remarks. At some point before this class, however, read the opening chapters of Basu's two novels, The Opium Clerk (2001) and The Miniaturist (2003) in order to get a sense of how he begins a long narrative. These selections are quite short, but you may find that they tempt you to investigate the books that they introduce.

11/21 Section meetings. Assignment Ten due today.

11/24 Begin Ian McEwan's Amsterdam. Read the extracts from E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel in the course packet.

Thanksgiving Break--November 26-28