This course is part of the two-semester sequence for Writing and Literature majors that familiarizes students with key texts of world literary culture. In addition to preparing students for more advanced offerings in Literary Studies, these courses provide a basis for considering how we became the writers and readers that we are today and supply the tools to become the readers and writers of tomorrow. This second sequence of the Foundations will begin in the eighteenth century but concentrate on nineteenth- and twentieth-century works. The various texts under consideration will be brought into dialogue with their resonant “kin” so as to encourage comparisons in genre, subject, theme, literary techniques, and historical context. Literary Foundations I is required as a prerequisite for all Intermediate Writing courses and all 3000-level Literature courses in Literary Studies. Literary Foundations II is a prerequisite for all Advanced Writing courses and all 3000-level Literature courses in Literary Studies. Students are encouraged to take Foundations I and II in sequence.
We have reached the end of the course. It has been a pleasure, and an adventure. I have marked the final exams; my final comments on those are available via MyFiles; look for a file called <lastname>-final.pdf in the same directory I have been using for your paper comments. (The instructions are, once more, here.)
As for this website, over the summer it will move, for archival purposes, to my own website at http://andrewgoldstone.com. That site will also show you how to reach me, should you ever wish to write!
All my best wishes for an excellent summer and beyond to everyone. And now that you have the foundations: read on!
I have finished marking all the papers that I received by the original deadline and am now returning them with my comments. It was a pleasure to think through your work. I am once again using MyFiles to return comments digitally; you will find them in the same folder where I returned my comments on the first paper and the presentation. Thus, you can follow the same instructions as before. Navigate through the MyFiles folder hierarchy to the directory I have created for you:
/Data/02/goldstoa/lf2/d/<lastname> or
/Data/02/goldstoa/lf2/e/<lastname>
Look for two files: one, <lastname>-paper2-marked.pdf, has my marginal notes, which you can view by opening the “Comment” pane in Adobe Reader. The other, <lastname>-paper2-cmt.pdf, contains a longer comment and your mark. Please ignore any funny files you see whose names begin with ._.
If I received your paper in hardcopy, you will not find the electronic marginal notes; I will return your paper tomorrow in class. If your paper came into my hands later than the deadline, I will be returning it to you electronically by Tuesday.
I’ll discuss the range of grades and give general comments to you all tomorrow. After that, if you have questions about my comments on your work, we can of course discuss them.
As I’ve mentioned in class, if you have not completed all the commonplacing assignments this semester, you still have the chance to fill in your “gaps” now. I will be checking the commonplace book for the last time on Monday, May 14, at which point I will mark your completion of the assignment as part of my calculation of your course grade.
In general, passage ID’s will be chosen to illustrate central themes, problems, and devices in the course texts. They will offer you opportunities to use your skill at analyzing the language and recognizing the individual styles of each of our authors. Indeed, you can receive partial credit for analyzing the language of a passage even if you cannot identify it. I will not seek out trick passages or obscure lines. Though I will draw at least some of the passages from material we focused on in class discussion, I may also include important passages we did not discuss in seminar. If you have read each book carefully and thoughtfully, used the commonplace book, and taken some notes, you will be in a good position for the exam. You are not expected to reread whole books ahead of May 14.
Students are welcome to form groups if they wish to write practice exam questions for one another. I am happy to facilitate this for any students who wish it and need help finding others or dividing up the review work.
04/24/2012: Continuing with Eliot
On Wednesday we will conclude our discussion of The Waste Land. Please bring the Eliot text (and the related texts assigned for yesterday) as well as Woolf’s novel. Read at least the first half of Mrs. Dalloway, up to p. 94. I have posted a copy of Monday’s handout, with the boneheaded typo corrected, on the course documents page.
And a final reminder: Today, Tuesday April 24, is your last chance to contact me if you wish to take the early exam on May 11.
04/19/2012: Taking the Final Early
This course has an in-class final exam on the last day of term, May 14. As we have discussed in class, I will offer the final on Friday, May 11 to those students who must take it then. As I need to reserve a room for the early exam, I must schedule the exam time and determine how many students will be present.
If you must take the exam on that Friday, e-mail me by this Monday with an explanation of why you need to take the early exam and a list of times you are not available because of a conflicting exam that day.
This extra exam time is not a convenience option. May 14 is a day of the semester, and you are in principle all obligated to be in residence. The exam has been listed on the syllabus from the start of the semester. I will consider the scheduling requirements only of students who will not be in New York on May 14. I will not schedule more than one make-up exam time.
I will send out a reminder message about this on Saturday. Please check your schedule carefully.
04/19/2012: Supplementary Readings on Eliot, for Monday
On Monday we’ll continue our discussion of The Waste Land. In addition to rereading the poem at various angles, please also read the supplementary materials described in the entry for April 23 on the updated schedule for the course. These consist of one essay and selections from the early responses to the poem. The responses are collected in the Norton Critical edition, including pieces by Woolf, a TLS reviewer, Edmund Wilson, Elinor Wylie, a Time reviewer, Charles Powell, Malcolm Cowley, and Ralph Ellison (in Eliot, ed. North, 137, 140-48, 153, 156, 163-66). If you do not have the Norton, you may find the excerpts on the Blackboard site for our course, under Resources. You may not redistribute those excerpts to others.
The assigned essay is “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” which you are required to read in its first publication context in the little magazine the Egoist. Magazines like the Egoist were important in the development of some of the self-consciously innovative and distinctive literary practices of the early twentieth century—the “modern movement,” as it was called then, or “modernism” as it’s called now. Eliot even started his own little magazine, The Criterion, in 1922—and published The Waste Land in it. But before that he wrote “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” his most enduring essay.
The Modernist Journals Project has digitized all the issues of the Egoist and makes them available as images or as PDFs. Follow these links for the two issues in which “Tradition” appeared:
part I
parts II–III
And then click the “view PDF” link to download the journal issue as a (large) PDF file. Take the time to scroll through these files to see what else was in the magazine, then locate “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”
You are encouraged to commonplace from what you read for Monday, but it is not required.
04/12/2012: Commonplacing shifts to Wednesday for the next two weeks
Since you are working on your papers for Monday and we are beginning our discussions of the Eliot and Woolf readings on Wednesdays, you have until next Wednesday to make your blog entries about Eliot and until the Wednesday after next to commonplace about Woolf. You can, of course, blog earlier or more often than required.
Please do make time to read The Waste Land at least once this weekend. It is a poem that rewards rereading.
04/12/2012: Presentation Comments
Some of you have been waiting a long time for my comments on your presentations; I have been holding off until I had a number of presentations to compare to one another. I have now written my comments on the presentations of all of you who have presented so far. You can find the comments in the same place as my comments on your first papers, the MyFiles server. You will have to navigate to the directory I have created for your work in this course; please refer to the same instructions you used to find your paper comments. Look for a file named <yourname>-pres.pdf. Ignore anything with ._ in its name.
04/10/2012: Read the alternate ending of the Dickens
Dickens originally wrote a different ending for Great Expectations, but was convinced by a friend to alter it. As you finish Great Expectations, please also read this earlier ending. You will find it in Appendix A of the Penguin.
I also remind you to bring in your work on the preparatory exercise for the paper to class on Wednesday.
03/22/2012: OED assignment for Monday
As discussed in class, your commonplacing assignment for Monday is a variation of our usual procedure. Find a word you are interested in or a word you don’t know in the reading from Douglass or from Dickinson. Look it up in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which you can also find a link to on the Course Resources page. Read the definition carefully, especially the etymology, alternate meanings, and historical quotations, as well as which meanings are oldest and which were current in the 19th century. Then write a commonplace entry which cites where you found the word you are looking up and quotes some interesting material from the definition in the OED. For a quick-and-dirty way to cite an OED entry, click the “Cite” link (next to “Print | Save | Email”), choose to “Preview” the citation in MLA format, and copy what you see. Happy hunting.
03/19/2012: First Papers Returned
I have returned my comments on your first papers electronically. To access them, you will have to navigate through the MyFiles folder hierarchy. I have created a webpage which explains how to do this, which is accessible on the Course Documents page. Please contact me if you cannot access the files or if you have questions about any of my comments. I’ll be returning my handwritten marginal notes to those of you who turned in hard copy on Wednesday.
03/12/2012: Dickinson readings and editions
Our next reading is a selection of poems by Emily Dickinson. These are available in the course e-reserve. On the schedule of readings I have noted the poems in the selection. Dickinson’s poems are not titled, so I have listed them by the number Thomas Johnson gives them in his selected edition of Dickinson, Final Harvest (from which I have drawn your selection). In parentheses after each poem number is the page number in Final Harvest.
As we’ll discuss in class, this matter of editions and titles is an extremely serious one for Dickinson, very few of whose poems were printed in her lifetime. If—as I hope many of you will—you wish to read more deeply in Dickinson, you should know some more about which Dickinson book to acquire from the library or the bookstore. I have used Johnson’s edition because of its convenient form, and you can easily find a copy of Final Harvest yourself. But today many scholars prefer a more recent edition of Dickinon’s work by R.W. Franklin. So if you are going to acquire a single Dickinson volume, it should be The Poems of Emily Dickinson, reading edition, ed. R.W. Franklin (Cambridge: Harvard U.P., 2005). (The paperback ISBN is 9780674018242.) I have also, as noted on the course texts page of the syllabus, placed this selection on reserve at Fogelman. Finally, the fullest edition of Dickinson’s poems is Franklin’s three-volume variorum (“including all the variants”) edition, also called The Poems of Emily Dickinson and available in Bobst both in the reference room and in the stacks.
Online you can find yet another version of Dickinson, from the late nineteenth century, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson after the poet’s death. (For example, in Google Books.) Do not use this text for this class. Todd and Higginson drastically altered Dickinson’s writings (and gave her poems titles). Though some of these alterations are interesting for what they tell us about how the late nineteenth century thought of its poets (and “poetesses”), they make this text unusable for studying Dickinson’s work. If you read only this online text rather than the Johnson or Franklin editions, you are not doing the reading for the course.
Please use the commonplace blog to record parts of poems or whole poems you find intriguing or puzzling. I will pay especially close attention to your commonplacing as I plan next week’s classes.
02/26/2012: Paper deadline extended to Wednesday
As my comments on drafts are still going out to all of you, I am extending the paper deadline to Wednesday, February 29, at noon. You are, of course, welcome to turn in your paper early. You may use Blackboard (look for “Paper 1 Final” under “Assignments”) or bring hard copy to me in Lang 260 on Wednesday.
We will keep to the same schedule of readings, discussing the first volume of Frankenstein on Wednesday.
02/21/2012: Preparing for the First Paper Workshop
In preparation for tomorrow’s paper workshop, I have assigned each of you to a workshop group; you will be spending much of tomorrow’s class session discussion each other’s papers within your group. I am making available your group members’ drafts on Blackboard. Please read these carefully today and bring them, in hard or digital copy, to class. I have also prepared a worksheet that will guide your commentary on each others’ work: it can be downloaded from the Course Documents page.
I will not be grading your drafts or collecting your comments on each others’ drafts. You owe it to one another to put your best effort into helping each other create the strongest papers you can. I will be joining each workshop group to help you along during class tomorrow.
Look for your classmates’ drafts on Blackboard, on the same Assignments page where you submitted your draft. You should see a single folder marked “Workshop Group N.” If you do not see all your group members’ drafts, expect a message from me later this afternoon. Some of you have been sick and will be participating in these workshops as readers only. If you have not been in touch with me about extra time and have not yet submitted your draft, please do so immediately. It is much better to workshop an incomplete draft intensively than to deprive yourself of this chance to refine your ideas by working with others.
Please write if you encounter any technical or other difficulties.
02/19/2012: P.B. Shelley reading and turning in drafts
For Wednesday, February 22, our principal work in class will be on your paper drafts. We will, however, reserve some time to begin the discussion of the poems of Percy Shelley, which we will continue next week. For now, concentrate your attention on Shelley’s long poem “Mont Blanc” and his sonnet “Ozymandias.”
Those of you have not e-mailed me your topics must do so by tomorrow at noon.
Your drafts are due on Tuesday by noon. A late draft will affect your paper grade and harm your ability to participate in the paper workshops.
To turn in your drafts, please use Blackboard. On the course Blackboard site, navigate to the Assignments page and then look for the “Paper 1 Draft” assignment. Click the “Paper 1 Draft” link and you will be offered a form for uploading your draft.
If at all possible, Please upload your draft in Portable Document Format (PDF). I have made some general instructions for producing PDFs from word processing programs like Word available from the Course Documents page.
Please contact me if you encounter any kinds of technical difficulties.
02/15/2012: Yes, there is class today
My classes are meeting as normal today, Wednesday, February 15. Ignore any left-over notices you might see on the classroom doors; those are from Monday.
02/07/2012: February 13 classes cancelled; Milton notes
To my great regret I am obliged to cancel class on Monday, February 13. Please continue to follow the syllabus, completing the Goethe reading for February 15.
I have added a short printable set of notes on the Milton poems to the Documents section of the website.
02/05/2012: Extra notes on Donne
I’ve added some brief annotations to the Donne reading; you can find the printable handout in the Course Documents. Please reread carefully the following poems in particular: “The Flea,” “The Sun Rising,” “The Canonization,” “A Valediction: forbidding Mourning,” “The Relic,” and the Holy Sonnet “Batter my heart.”
02/03/2012: Accessing the E-reserves
To access the course E-reserve, you will need a password. This is not the same as any other password you may have. The password can be found on the course Blackboard site: click the “E-Reserve” link at the left to go to a page which will tell you your password.
02/02/2012: Room for Make-Up Class, Friday, February 3
The make-up classes this 2/3 will be held in Room 405, 66 W 12th St. (not our usual building or room). They meet at 10:30 and 2:00. Students should attend whichever session they can; if you have a partial conflict, come for as much of the class as you can. Bring Gulliver’s Travels. My thanks to those who have complete conflicts who have been in touch.
02/01/2012: Presentation assignment
The assignment for in-class presentations can now be found in the Documents section of the website.
02/01/2012: Friday make-up classes
This Friday, February 3, I will hold classes to make up for Monday’s missed session. There will be sessions 10:30-12:30 and 2:00-4:00 (locations TBA). Students should attend whichever session they can make, for as long as they are available. Students who are unable to attend either session must contact me to make alternate arrangements. The topic of the make-up sessions will be Gulliver’s Travels. I have updated the schedule and the printable syllabus accordingly.
01/24/2012: And we're off
So it begins! The first day of class was a pleasure. This announcement is a reminder to try out the commonplacing exercise and to write me with your response to the presentation schedule by this evening, Tuesday, January 24. Make sure you can get your hands on the course books, too.
01/22/2012: First class meetings
The first meetings of both my LF2 sections will be tomorrow, Monday, January 23. The 12 p.m. section meets in Lang 260. The 2 p.m. section meets in Lang 263. If possible, please bring your copy of Gulliver’s Travels to class. Students are welcome to e-mail me with questions.
01/22/2012: Blackboard available
The course Blackboard site is now available—you may login if you wish. You will also find the password to the e-reserves via the “E-reserves” tab in Blackboard. We will make some use of Blackboard, but this site is the primary course website.
12/20/2011: Not all online resources yet available
The course Blackboard site is not yet available, and the “Resources” page is under construction. I will explain how to use the e-reserves (see “Poetry Selections” on the Course Texts page) and the course commonplace book (see the Commonplacing page) on the first day of class.
12/09/2011: Course website online
This website is now live. All course details are preliminary and subject to change in the next month.
