Debriefing the Wildlife Survey

Great job, everyone, with the Wildlife Survey today. Full disclosure: It was the first time I'd done an exercise like that. I had a handout prepared with a list of all the characters I had assigned, so that if everyone had difficulty identifying one another, they would at least be able to narrow down the range of possibilities. I thought about handing it out from the start, but then I decided I'd see how things went without it. As you all now know, at no point during the class session did it seem like such a crutch would be necessary--you guys displayed impressive recall, ingenuity, and collegiality in making the exercise work. Well done, all of you.

For Credit: Final Blog Post I

Two questions:

1) What do you honestly think you will retain from this course in five years?
2) What do you hope that you retain from this course in five years (even if it strikes you as unlikely)?

You must answer both.

Deadline: Friday (May 8), noon.

For Credit: Final Blog Post II

What have you learned this semester that the final exam does not give you the opportunity to demonstrate? What could you write about at length and knowledgeably--but for the fact that the final exam doesn't ask the questions that would allow you to do so?

Deadline: Friday (5/8) noon.

Poems for the Exam!

For Part III of the exam, you must choose one of the following poems:

William Collins, Ode to Peace

Mary Jones, Soliloquy on an Empty Purse

William Cowper, Verses Supposed to Be Written by Alexander Selkirk

Deadlines: The Official Story

Deadlines for the remaining course requirements are as follows:

Revised papers are due Monday (5/11), noon. You must put the hard copy of the marked up original paper in my mailbox (#299) in order to get credit for your revision.

Final exams are due Tuesday (5/12). If you want to hand in a hard copy of your exam, it must be in my mailbox (#299) by 4pm on the 13th. If you are e-mailing your exam to me as an attachment (.doc or .pdf, please, NOT .docx!), you must get it to me by 10pm.

There will be one more blog post that you can respond to for credit, a follow-up to the final mapping exercise.

If you are handing in your revision late (which will involve a 1/3 grade late penalty), you must put the hard copy of the original marked up paper in my mailbox by 4pm on Tuesday (5/12)--though you can e-mail the revision to me with your exam at 10pm.

I cannot accept any work for this course after 10pm on Tuesday, 5/12.

Extra Office Hours

I'm holding extra office hours this week. Today (Tuesday), until 4pm; Wed. 2 - 4; and Thurs. 9 - 10 and 12:30 - 1:30. If you want to meet on Friday, e-mail me to set up a time.

For Credit: The Final Map

On Wednesday, we will do our final "mapping" exercise. This version will build on our progression from charting unknown territory, to developing visual representations of the topography, to placing known landmarks in relation to one another, to tracking game within that increasingly familiar landscape. Our final exercise will be a wildlife survey. To help you locate and identify indigenous species, you should bring with you anything by way of a field guide that will be helpful: notes, handouts, laptop computers (you will be permitted to use the English Bldg. wireless connection).

To help you prepare for this exercise, I want you to think back to the list of "survivors" from our first mapping exercise (you can find the list at the bottom of the sidebar). Now that you have a better sense of what the terrain includes, you are in a position to reassess the significance of those "survivors" and to evaluate their relationship to the other writers that you have encountered this semester. Think back to the texts you have found most engrossing, and reflect on the selection process that produced those "survivors." Consider, too, the challenges of natural resource management (so to speak). In an age of dwindling resources for higher education and increasing pressure to make college a sort of preprofessional training, as courses in literary history become increasingly difficult to fill, what are the texts, authors, characters, insights from this period that it remains vital to retain? What, in other words, are the endangered species of the later eighteenth century that ought to be protected and cherished? And which are the cockroaches that can be counted on to survive any future ecological catastrophe? Is the "survivors" list drawn from textbooks an accurate guide to importance and significance or are there other ways to determine what writers of the past we should nurture in the future?

Identify a candidate for the "endangered species list" (or a potential cockroach) here. Give some well-founded reasons for your choice.

Deadline: Wednesday (5/6), 10am.

For Credit: Manfred and Conrad?

(h/t to Cayla for e-mailing me the URL for the Youtube clip and bringing it up in class!)

Note that we also get a possible representation of Jaquez and Diego here as well.

Reflect on Walpole's use of comic servant characters in this novel. As you have read in the reviews (and the second preface), it was a point of some contention whether such characters aided or undermined the novel. What do you think? Support your claims with evidence from the text.

Deadline: Monday (5/4), 10am.

For Credit: Propose an Exam Question Here

Don't worry--you won't be committing you or your classmates to anything! But think for a moment all that you've encountered and thought about this semester in 427. Survey in your mind the depth and breadth of reading you've covered. And then consider: what sort of question would best allow you to demonstrate your learning in this class?

Propose an essay question for the 427 take-home final here. It should either (a) encourage close reading of texts from the course, (b) allow you to display interpretive and analytical skills that you have gained in your study of later C18 literature, (c) draw on the knowledge you have acquired in the course of the semester, or ideally, (d) some combination of (a), (b), and (c).

Deadline: Friday (5/1), 10am.

For Credit: Casting the Movie

Now that Jane Austen has been done (on a big budget and with top-shelf actors), what if Hollywood moved on to earlier classic novels?

Reflect here on what a film version of Otranto would be like. How would a director have to change it for a big-screen adaptation? Who would you cast as Manfred? Theodore? Matilda? Isabella?

Deadline: Wednesday (4/29), 10am.

For Credit: Morality and Otranto

In the “Preface to the First Edition,” the putative C18 translator of the putatively medieval manuscript points out a “defect” in it: “I could wish he [the author] had grounded his plan on a more useful moral that this; that the sins of fathers are visited on their children to the third and fourth generation.” The translator points out that not only is this moral wrong-headed (as “dread of so remote a punishment” is unlikely to deter anyone from committing sins) but it is also weakened by the narrative (which suggests that “such anathema may be diverted by devotion to Saint Nicholas”). Using evidence internal to the novel about what Walpole is trying to do, suggest one reason why Walpole gives his historical recreation a weak moral, only to draw attention to its weakness in his own preface.

As always, support your claim with evidence from the text.

Deadline: Wednesday (4/29), noon.

Horace Walpole's House

Horace Walpole's fascination with things medieval extended beyond the writing of The Castle of Otranto. This is Strawberry Hill, the house he was famous for designing (and it was where he lived!) as depicted in C18:



And here it is now:



You can see more pictures of it and donate to the ongoing restoration project here.

For Credit: How to Read this Novel?

We batted around a lot of ideas in class on Friday about how Walpole means us to read this novel:

• as a critique of the old, decaying social order with its rigid class hierarchies and misguided emphasis on blood lines
• as pure, whacked-out entertainment
• as a pleasurably dark experience of terror and sublimity
• as a critique of patriarchy
• as....? There are many other possibilities.

What do you think? Once you've (ahem) finished the novel, continue the conversation here--but offer some justification from the text to support your claims.

Deadline: Monday (4/27), 10am.

Sheesh.

To honor those who did the reading, everyone who passed the pop quiz today got extra blog credit (you'll find it, or your big fat ZERO, in your Compass grades).

For Monday: finish the novel and read the two Prefaces (p. 5 - 13) and the early reviews (p. 117 - 127). If you don't have the Penguin edition (or another edition that includes that material), see if you can borrow a copy from someone else in the class.

For Credit: Question for Those Acquainted with Later Gothic Fiction

In class on Wednesday we talked a lot about what "Gothic" fiction has come to mean, and there a number of obvious elements that we discussed that clearly link The Castle of Otranto to the later novels that it inspires (ghosts, the supernatural, labyrinthine castles, virtuous damsels in distress).

Are there ways in which this novel differs from later Gothic fictions? Are there elements of it that later practitioners of the genre seem to have abandoned?

Deadline: Friday (4/24), 10am.

For Credit: Huh???

The Castle of Otranto abounds in what I will call, for lack of a pithier term, "WTF moments." The enormous helmet that falls out of the sky, crushing Conrad, on the second page of the novel is perhaps the most obvious and bewildering of these instances, but there are other points in the novel where readers may find themselves puzzled over whether the author intends them to weep or chortle.

Identify an episode, a line, a moment in this novel that prompts your "WTF???" reflex.

Deadline: Friday (4/24), 10am.

For Credit: Is The Castle of Otranto Sublime?

Discuss. Cite text (Walpole and/or Burke) to support your claims.

Deadline: Friday (4/24), 10am.