UNIL
Vous êtes ici: UNIL > L'enseignement > Fiche de cours
Français | English   Imprimer   

Fiche de cours

Explication de textes : The Romantic and Victorian Lyric

Faculté de gestion: Faculté des lettres

Responsable(s): Philip Lindholm
Intervenant(s): -

Période de validité: 2018 -> 2018

Pas d'horaire défini.

Séminaire

Semestre de printemps
2 heures par semaine
28 heures par semestre

Langue(s) d'enseignement: anglais
Public: Oui
Crédits: 0
Polycopiés: Oui

Objectif

There are three main objectives for this course:

1. Develop close reading skills in poetry, building on a foundation provided by ILA (Introduction to Literary Analysis). Students will thus be expected already to know some basic meters, such as iambic pentameter, and poetic forms, such as the sonnet and free verse. We will discuss poetic address and voicing, rhythm and meter, imagery and figurative language, etc.

2. Discuss key poems of the Romantic period (ca.1789-1832), an age marked by a series of revolutions - the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and profound artistic re-evaluations of self, identity, consciousness, and creativity.The course focuses on a reasonable selection of lyric poems by major Romantic poets and explores themes central to Romanticism, including nature and the sublime, the individual, the emotional, the imagination, the irrational, the supernatural, the visionary and the sociopolitical role of poetry.

3. Discuss major poems of the Victorian era (ca. 1832-1901), focusing on how poets engaged with the artistic achievements of their Romantic predecessors while attempting to adapt to rapid social transformation, unrivalled economic and political expansion, and the emergence of the printed text as a commodity incorporated into a new culture of print. The course explores the profound transformations of the printed lyric in the nineteenth century by examining how an increasingly self-conscious and self-reflexive poetry, overshadowed by the popularity of the novel, enabled poetic experimentation and the birth of new poetic forms, such as the dramatic monologue.

Contenu

We will be studying, among others, some of the most famous poems of Romantic authors such as William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), John Keats (1795-1821), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), as well as Victorian poetry by Robert Browning (1812-1889), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892), Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) and Matthew Arnold (1822-1888). After the Easter break, we will visit the Fondation de l'Hermitage to see the Victorian painting exhibition "La peinture anglaise, de Turner à Whistler" .

Evaluation

To obtain course credit, you must:

1. Read the poems and relevant secondary material in advance of the seminar for which they are assigned.
2. Write a short critical essay on at least one poem from the syllabus demonstrating close reading skills and making reference to at least three works of secondary criticism (c. 1500 words [c. 4-5 Pages]).
3. Participate in a short 20-25 minute oral presentation on a poem in groups of 2, followed by class discussion.
4. Actively participate in class discussions on these texts, either by leading a group discussion in seminar or acting as respondent to group discussions.

The seminar evaluation will be the grade you receive for your critical essay (see EDGE p. 88 for assessment criteria), but your overall seminar performance (including the group oral presentation) will be taken into account.

Bibliographie

The core texts will be: 1. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume D: The Romantic Period, edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al., 10th ed., Norton, 2018 2. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume E: The Victorian Age, edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al., 10th ed., Norton, 2018.

Unicentre - CH-1015 Lausanne - Suisse
Tél. +41 21 692 11 11
Canton de Vaud
Swiss University