For Credit: The Week in Review

Great responses to the "one-minute wrap-up" today!

My goal in these opening weeks is to teach you some of the reading techniques you'll be needing to explore this material independently, while introducing you to some of the aesthetic and intellectual ideas from the period that help to explain it. My explanations are intentionally sketchy: you'll be filling in the colors and details yourselves as you read more widely in the literature of this period. That way, these concepts can be supple interpretive tools to help you gain pleasure and historical insight rather than rigid boxes into which you squeeze the reading.

In the next couple of weeks, I'll be scaling back the "how to read" and increasing the "relevant aesthetic and intellectual concerns" dimensions of the course. I'll also be throwing some C20/C21 critical approaches into the mix: how do critics now categorize and evaluate this body of literature.

Here's what you've been learning thus far:

"C18 writing can be understood by looking at the sentence structure."

"C18 poetry is easy to read once you unravel the grammar and read it in its logical order."

There were a number of responses along those lines. It may seem like an obvious point once you know it, but first-time readers of C18 poetry often get discouraged right off the bat because it doesn't occur to them to approach a poem in this concrete and workman-like way. Or as some people put it:

"C18 poems say what they mean and are not purposefully confusing."

"C18 poems can actually be easily understood with concentration and patience."

Some responses addressed the form of the course activities:

"The most interesting thing I learned this week was what my fellow classmates thought would be relevant from our time period in the future."

Some people responded with information that they had picked up about the content of the literature, particularly "the sublime" and "sensibility":

"Actual working definitions of sublime and sensibility relevant to the C18...helps to understand the goals or concepts at work."

"the discussion about the sublime...it was valuable to see what authors sought to capture in their work and to what ends they did so"

"This Week's Fun Fact: Fideism -- a relativistic middle ground between natural religion and revealed religion, unofficially practice by many people through the 18th century."

Others described how their assumptions had been changed:

"The most memorable thing I learned this week is how poets make use of normal bodily functions to make humor or even to lighten the tone of a work."

"Later C18 literature is multi-faceted, many surprising graphic poems (Holt Water, Dying Indian) that don't fit into ideas of 'traditional' C18 literature (i.e., Pope)."

What would you add to this range of responses in order to give a full picture of what we've covered thus far? What questions do you have about the material so far that you haven't had a chance to ask in class?

Deadline: Monday (2/2), 10am.