Research Seminar for Literature Majors (397-0-21)
Topic
19th C US Poetry & the Hist of the Book
Instructors
Jay Grossman
Meeting Info
University Hall 418: Tues, Thurs 11:00AM - 12:20PM
Overview of class
Your mission: to recover a work of poetry published in the nineteenth-century United States from the library's open stacks or from Special Collections, and to make every aspect of it the object of intensive study—from the paper quality to the binding to the cover to the illustrations to the book design to the publisher to the author to the book's circulation and reception, and including all of the words and poems inside it. By investigating every aspect of a book of poetry in this way, you will be demonstrating what can be learned by attending not simply to the content of the poems, but also to the poetic and printed forms in which these poems originally circulated. To do so is to engage in the interdisciplinary scholarly methods of what has come to be called Studies in the History of the Book, and by quarter's end, each member of the class will have pursued unique questions and reached unique conclusions about a single book that provides a window on the cultural work of poetry in the nineteenth-century United States. You can read examples of what other students in past sections of this class have accomplished by checking out the website of their completed essays: https://sites.northwestern.edu/eng397/.
Alongside this independent work, we will spend class meetings reading selectively from the vast archive of U.S. nineteenth-century poetry—an archive much more varied, in terms of both form and content, than the two poets who have most frequently come to represent it: Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. In so doing, our classroom discussions will practice the same methodologies that each class member is undertaking with regard to a single book of poetry.
Evaluation Method
No exams. As in all English 397 Research Seminars, the primary work of the course is the guided completion of a 15-page research paper, following the steps embedded in the syllabus.
Class Materials (Required)
William Cullen Bryant; Thomas Cole; Richard Henry Dana; Emily Dickinson; Ralph Waldo Emerson; Margaret Fuller; Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Forest Leaves (c. 1848); Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline (1847); Henry David Thoreau; Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773); Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855); William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (1798).
Class Attributes
Advanced Expression
Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area
Enrollment Requirements
Enrollment Requirements: Department Majors and Minors Only. No Freshmen/First Years