Pastoralism and 20th Century British Literature
Instructor: Dr. Jan Haswell
Office: Faculty Center #277 E-mail: jhaswell@falcon.tamucc.edu
Office Hours: MW 9:00-10:00AM and 11:00-noon, TR 9:00-11:00AM, or by appointment
Phone: 825-5981
"Tell me the landscape in which you live and I will tell you who you are."
Jose Ortega y Gassett
Description of the Course: The focus of this course is place and identity. We will develop this focus on three separate levels:
• in terms of theme, by looking at how British writers in this century interweave personal identity with a sense of "home";
• in terms of genre, by analyzing how these writers employ or reject sub-genres of the past as they relate to their landscape;
• in terms of culture, by connecting these readings to issues of place and space.
We will read, discuss together, and write about place and landscape, drawing on our knowledge of the 20th century (both formal and personal), background from other courses, and areas of personal interests, such as art and cinema.
Objectives of the Course: This course encourages creative and synthetic thinking by focusing on a wide range of readings, on old and new genres, and on current issues that affect us all. It is appropriate for English majors and minors, as well as for non-majors interested in environmental concerns, the importance of nature in our lives, and how identity and place often converge in literature, art, theatre, music, and other forms of popular culture.
Required Texts
Novels:
Evelyn Waugh: A Handful of Dust
Graham Swift: Waterland
Paul Scott: Staying On
Arundhati Roy: The God of Small Things
Short Stories:
D. H. Lawrence: "The Horse Dealer's Daughter"
Kenneth Grahame: "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn"
Edna O'Brien: "The House of My Dreams"
Jeanette Winterson: "Orion"
Bill Bryson: "Fat Girls in Des Moines"
Movies:
Virginia Woolf: Orlando
E. M. Forster: A Room With a View
Michael Ondaatje: The English Patient
Evaluation and Grading:
1. Daily work: (30% of your final grade). As a course designed around discussions, your attendance and preparation will play a crucial role in the quality of our class work and in the success of the course. Be prepared to participate in a variety of ways: occasional in-class writing, small group work, taking charge of a portion of discussion, etc. You will be awarded points for your work that, at the end of the semester, will be totaled and then curved into a letter grade. The point scale:
0 points - you weren't here and we missed you1 point - you were in class but unprepared
2 points - you wrote or spoke in a way that demonstrated you had read the material
3 points - you wrote or spoke in a way that demonstrated you had read and thought about the material
4 points - you wrote or spoke in a profound way about the material
2. Oral Presentations: (5% of your final grade). You will select and research one of the authors in the course to produce an oral presentation for the class on the first day the reading is scheduled (12-15 minute presentation). Your presentation will include significant events and experiences in the author's life, titles of his/her other literary works, and fundamentals of his/her aesthetic theory (the purpose of art, major themes, etc.). An important aspect of your presentation will be handouts (like a chronology of events, list of publications, perhaps even a picture) for students to consult later on. Depending on the number of students in the class, you will (most probably) be working with one of two others to divide up the work.
3. Short Studies: (three, each 15% of your final grade for a total of 45%). These short essays (4-5 pages) will address the mini-theme of the section (home, nature, and landscape). Our readings will provide the "rhetorical occasion" for the paper, but you are not limited to drawing on literature alone. Your grade will reflect
In addition to these considerations, I expect interpretive papers, a thesis that goes well beyond description, even beyond argument, and succeeds in articulating an explicit, insightful, and sophisticated interpretation of the work. Such an interpretation requires a deeper than average understanding, integrative skills (bringing various pieces together like structure and theme), and personal engagement with the text.
4. Poetry Journal: (20% of your final grade). Most of you have experience in keeping a reading journal for other English classes. For this class, I am asking you to regard your journal as a companion (like a diary) and a collection point for both visual images and poetry that connect with the umbrella theme of place and our subtopics (home, nature, and landscape). In this way, your journal will complete our syllabus insofar as I have assigned prose writers but no poets. At a minimum, you will have 6 entries for each subtopic (or a minimal total of 18 entries). A full entry will include the text of a poem (identified by author and date of publication), a visual image or reference to another art form (like a play or movie), and reflections on how your poem and image deepen your understanding of the subtopic. Note that your selections do not have to imitate the model I provide. As you move through your journal, you may discover (or consciously form) a thread that you find valuable. "Threads" might include issues like segregation, environmental problems, travel writing, the politics of mapping/drawing boundaries, the importance of living space, pilgrimage, immigration or refugees--phenomena that result when people and places interface.
Policies:
1. You are allowed three unexcused absences, free and clear. After that, you will be asked to conference in my office about your status and goals in the course. I will not accept late assignments unless you have made previous arrangements. (Note: being absent on the day a paper is due doesn't get you off the hook!)
2. The most wicked act in the academic universe is plagiarism, or "the presentation of the work of another as one's own work." Note that plagiarism is only one form of academic dishonesty, which also includes falsification (the intentional alteration of information), fabrication (the intentional invention of information), multiple submission (using the same material for two separate assignments or courses without permission from the instructors), and abuse of academic materials (the intentional destruction of resource materials). Inadequately orincorrectly documented material is an example of plagiarism.
3. If you use web sources in any of your presentations, research, or writing, be sure that your source is reliable and that you know the current MLA standards for documenting e-sources.
Class Schedule:
Week #1: (August 26-30)
Monday: Introduction to the course (Forest Gump and The Wizard of Oz)Wednesday: Place and the concept of home; Reading due: handouts (Bryson)
Friday: Place and the concept of home; Reading due: handouts (O'Brien)
Week #2: (Sept 2-6)
Monday: Handful of DustReading due: Waugh - Ch I and Ch II, parts 1-2Wednesday: Handful of Dust
Reading due: Waugh - Ch II parts 3-4 and Ch III parts 1-2Friday: Handful of Dust
Reading due: Waugh - Ch III parts 3-7
Week #3: (Sept 9-13)
Monday: Handful of Dust:Reading due: Waugh - Ch IV and Ch V part 1Wednesday: Handful of Dust
Reading due: Waugh - Ch V parts 2-4Friday: Handful of Dust
Reading due: Waugh - Ch VI and Ch VII
Week #4: (Sept 16-20)
Monday: Country House SubgenreReading due: Jonson and Lanyer (handouts)Wednesday: Orlando (viewing and discussion)
Friday Orlando (viewing and discussion)
Week #5: (Sept 23-27)
Monday: Writing due: draft of first short study - HomeWednesday: Pastoralism and the Golden Age
Reading due: Horace and Virgil (handouts)Friday: Nature, Soft Primitivism, and City vs. Country
Reading Due: Grahame and Lawrence (handouts)Writing due: first short study - Home
Week #6 (Sept 30-Oct 4)
Monday: WaterlandReading due: Swift - Ch 1-7Wednesday: Waterland
Readings due: Swift - Ch 8-11Friday: Waterland
Reading due: Swift - Ch 12-23
Week #7: (Oct 7-11)
Monday: WaterlandReading due: Swift - Ch 24-31Wednesday: Waterland
Reading due: Swift - Ch 32-42Friday: Waterland
Reading due: Swift - Ch 43-end
Week #8: (Oct 14-18)
Monday: The English Patient (viewing and discussion)Wednesday: The English Patient (viewing and discussion)
Friday: The English Patient (viewing and discussion)
Week #9: (Oct 21-25)
Monday: Writing due: Draft of second short study - NatureWednesday: Landscape painting/photography and the ideology of mapping
Friday: Landscape: reading images in class
Writing due: Second short study - Nature
Week #10: (Oct 28-Nov 1)
Monday: Staying OnReading due: Scott - Ch I-IIIWednesday: Staying On
Reading due: Scott - Ch IV-VIIFriday: Staying On
Reading due: Scott - Ch VIII - IX
Week #11: (Nov 4-8)
Monday: Staying OnReading due: Scott - Ch X-XIIWednesday: Staying On
Reading due: Scott - Ch XIII - endFriday: Documenting landscape (Broughton video)
Week #12: (Nov 11-15)
Monday: Postmodern landscape and Home-ironized: The God of Small ThingsReading due: Roy - Ch I and Ch II (20 pages to "Now, on the way to Cochin...")Wednesday: The God of Small Things
Reading due: Roy - rest of Ch II-IVFriday: The God of Small Things
Reading Due: Roy - Ch V-VIII
Week #13: (Nov 18-22)
Monday: The God of Small ThingsReading due: Roy - Ch IX - XIIWednesday: The God of Small Things
Reading due: Roy - Ch XIII - XIVFriday: The God of Small Things
Reading due: Roy - Ch XV - end
Week #14: (Nov 25-29)
Monday: A Room With a View (viewing and discussion)Wednesday: A Room With a View (viewing and discussion)
Friday: holiday
Week #15: (Dec 2-6)
Monday: Writing due: Draft of third short study - LandscapeWednesday: The third is not given: course review
Reading due: Winterson (handout)Friday: Course evaluations
Writing due: Draft of third short study - Landscape
Poetry journal is due during final examination period: Monday, Dec 9 - 11:00AM.
Suggested Secondary Reading - Pastoralism
Baer, Ulrich. "Contemporary Holocaust Images: the Landscape of Loss and the Limits of
the Photograph." South Atlantic Quarterly 96.4 (Fall 1997): 741-53.
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin, 1977.
Bermingham, Ann. Landscape and Ideology: the English Rustic Tradition. 1740-1860.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
Crawford, Rachel. "English Georgic and British Nationhood." ELH 65.1 (19980: 123-
158. Online. <http://caliope.jhu.edu/jounrals/elh/v065/65.rcrawford.html>
Empson, William. English Pastoral Poetry and Some Versions of Pastoral. New York: W.
W. Norton, 1974.
Herndl, Carl G. and Stuart C. Brown, eds. Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in
Contemporary America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996.
Lawrence, Claire. "A Possible Site for Contested Manliness: Landscape and the Pastoral in
the Victorian Era." Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 4.2 (Fall1997) :17-37.
Lorsch, Susan E. Where Nature Ends: Literary Responses to the Designification of
Landscape. London: Associated University Press, Inc. 1983.
Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America.
New York: Oxford UP, 1964.
-----. "Pastoralism in America." Ideology and Classic American Literature. eds. Sacvan
Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. 36-69.
McGregor, Gaile. The Noble Savage in the New World Garden: Notes Toward a
Syntactics of Place. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State UP, 1988.
Mitchell, W. J., ed. Landscape and Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Nash, Roderick. Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven: Yale UP, 1967.
Patterson, Annabel. Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valery. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1987.
Pugh, Simon, ed. Reading Landscape: Country-city-capital. New York: Manchester
University Press, 1990.
Rostvig, Maren-Sofie. The Happy Man: Studies in the Metamorphosis of a Classical Ideal.
Vol. I. New York: Norwegian Universities Press, 1962.
Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.
Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.
Philosophy of Place - Bibliography
Bacelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. New York: The Orion Press, 1958.
Bondi, Liz. "Locating Identity Politics." Place and the Politics of Identity. eds. Michael
Keith and Steve Pile. New York: Routledge, 1993. 84-101.
Casey, Edward S. Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the
Place-World. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993.
Chaudhuri, Una. Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama. Ann Arbor: U of
Michigan P, 1997.
Jameson, Fredric. "Cognitive Mapping." Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. eds
Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1988.
Kaplan, Caren. "Reconfigurations of Geography and Historical Narrative: A Review
Essay." Public Culture 3.1 (Fall 1990): 25-32.
Keith, Michael, and Steve Pile, eds. "Introduction." Place and the Politics of
Identity. New York: Routledge, 1993. 1-40.
Leed, Eric J. The Mind of the Traveler: from Gilgamesh to Global Tourism.
New York: Basic Books, 1991.
Price-Chalita, Patricia. "Spatial Metaphor and the Politics of Empowerment: Mapping a
Place for Feminism and Postmodernism in Geography." Antipode 26.3 (1 July1994): 236-254.
Short, John Rennie. Imagined Country: Environment, Culture, and Society. New
York: Routledge, 1991.
Sojo, Edward W. Postmodern Geographies: A Reassertion of Space in Critical Social
Theory. New York: Verso, 1989.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspectives of Experience. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1977.