GER Information: Fulfills 3 hrs. Humanities-Literature GER. This course will help you to:

1. understand and engage in the human experience through the interpretation of literature
   
2. become aware of the act of interpretation itself as a critical form of knowing in the study of literature; and
3. make scholarly arguments about literature using reasons and ways of supporting those reasons that are appropriate to the field of study.

The Pictures drawn in our Minds, are laid in fading Colours; and if not sometimes refreshed, vanish and disappear.

---John Locke, Essay on Human Understanding (1688)  II.xxvii; II.x

I cannot paint what then I was.

--- William Wordsworth, “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” Lyrical Ballads (1798)

British literature during the Romantic period, roughly 1789-1832, began to emphasize memory as an especially valuable source of literary inspiration. Although a century earlier John Locke had insisted that memory was crucial to any coherent sense of self and was fundamental to human identity, his contemporaries and most writers who preceded the Romantics exercised their memories less on their own pasts than on recalling and preserving the great cultural achievements of past peoples, especially the Greeks and Romans. The British Romantics, however, wrote in the wake of the French Revolution's unforgettable mandate to erase past conceptions of church, state, and even time. Many of the great Romantic writers who matured in this dangerous but exciting era cultivated a novel, more modern mode of memory: they recalled themselves at earlier moments and made the past personal. They found in fleeting thoughts of who they once were a more immediate and genuine way to write. The Romantics trained and disciplined their memories afresh on the delights and traumas of childhood, the pleasures and excesses of youth, and the relation of memory to imagination in order to translate individual recollections into lasting literature. We will sample how Romantic writers including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Lamb, and Austen brought the discipline of literature into closer alignment with disciplined memory.

Learning Outcomes

At the end of the course students should be able to:

• interpret independently how memory is represented in British Romantic literature and culture
  
• express  interpretation in well-structured arguments
  
• formulate and pursue an independent research project
  
• identify some ideas and styles characteristic of Romanticism generally
  
• speak in public with increased confidence
• respond creatively to intellectual texts
  

Participation includes your grades on periodic writing assignments, quizzes, and coming to class prepared, having done the readings and being able to talk and write about them intelligently.

You must complete all the required work to pass the class.  I will grade plus/minus.

Attendance: You are allowed 3 absences. If you are absent, unexcused, more than 3 times over the course of the semester, your absences will count progressively against your final grade. Every 2 absences beyond the allowed 3 loses you a half letter grade on the calculated final grade. Anyone who misses the first two classes can be immediately dropped from the class. For the definition of an unexcused absence, see http://www.ncsu.edu/policies/academic_affairs/pols_regs/REG205.00.4.php

Plagiarism: Anyone convicted will receive an F for the paper, or the course at my discretion.

Late Papers: Papers received ONE class session late will be accepted but docked a full grade.
No late papers accepted after one class session late.

Disabilities: Reasonable accommodations will be made for students with verifiable disabilities. In order to take advantage of available accommodations, students must register with Disability Services for Students at 1900 Student Health Center, Campus

            Box 7509, 515-7653. http://www.ncsu.edu/dso/

Academic Integrity Assumption
Universities are unique communities committed to creating and transmitting knowledge. They depend on freedom - individuals' freedom to explore ideas and to explore and further their own capabilities. Those freedoms depend on the good will and responsible behavior of all the members of the community, who must treat each other with tolerance and respect. They must allow each other to develop the full range of their capabilities and take full advantage of the institution's resources.

Required Texts & Resources
Print Texts --available now in the NCSU bookstore.

Austen, Jane. Persuasion. Ed. John Davie. New York: Oxford UP, 197
Wordsworth, William. The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850. Ed. Jonathan Wordsworth et al. New York: W. W. Norton,

ONLINE TEXTS & MEDIA
Byron, Lord George Gordon. Manfred
Blake, William. Memory Hither Come
Chapman, George. Iliad trans., selections
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Kubla Khan
---. Youth and Age
---. Biographia Literaria, selections
Collins, Billy. Forgetfulness
Godwin, William. Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, excerpts
Hume, David. Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, excerpts
Keats, John. On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
Lamb, Charles. Dream-Children, A Reverie
Locke, John. Essay Concerning Human Understanding, excerpts
Wordsworth, William. Tintern Abbey

How to Use the Oxford English Dictionary Online (Morillo)

Fundamentals of Reading Formal Poetry

Creative projects