English 102: British
and American Literature, 1650-1780
Professor Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook
Issues and Questions
These questions and comments may be useful in guiding your
reading as you prepare for class, brainstorm for essay topics, and review
for exams. Let them stimulate your own explorations of the texts, and watch
for connections throughout the quarter.
Paradise Lost: Milton's Epic Remodel
- Watch for the oppositions structuring the poem: high/low,
dark/light, physical/intellectual. Do these ever get confused or inverted?
- What attitudes are you picking up toward the pleasures
of the body: food, sex, aesthetic pleasure? Is beauty good or bad?
- Who gets to talk (and to whom) in this work?
What is the status of language -- talking, reasoning, writing (poetry)?
What, and who, is a hero?
The Rover: What’s the status of masquerade
in The Rover? Does it create a “world upside down” with revolutionary
potential, or set up a series of mistakes and deceits that have to be corrected?
-Is Angellica Bianca a victim or an agent? How does she
seek to control her social meaning?
- Does Hellena “succeed” where Angellica Bianca “fails”?
In what sense?
- How do these texts use books and people as metaphors for each other? According to these writings, how do the new technologies of print, and the literary marketplace that develops along with them, help shape 18th-c. society?
- What do we learn about Mr. Spectator in the first issue, and why are these details important? WHY is he (just) a spectator, as opposed to an agent or "player" in the world? What specific spaces does he mention as his own turf? Compare Mr. Spectator to such current social "authorities" as Martha Stewart, Miss Manners, Ann Landers: what's the same? What has changed? (For starters, why not MRS. Spectator or MR. Manners?) Why does Mr. Spectator plan to devote so much time to educating women?
Historical contexts: rise in literacy, especially among women; a new interest in fashion and consumer goods; increased availability of exotic commodities like tea, coffee, and chocolate.
Rape
of the Lock: Dangers and Delights of Ornament
- Why couplets? How
do they work, as opposed to other ways of packaging meaning? Read a
few out loud and think about how their form shapes your reception of their
content.
- Watch what happens to the sun through the course of The
Rape of the Lock. Why is our heroine in bed when the poem begins? (Does
she ever really leaves that privatized, eroticized space?)
- Commerce and eros: how are these linked in the dressing-table
scene?
- Watch for echoes of Paradise Lost: Belinda as Eve;
sylphs as … angels? devils?; high/low opposition. Who or what causes the Fall,
in this version?
- Last but not least, if beauty, ornament, aesthetic artifice
are so dangerous, how does the writer of this very beautiful, highly wrought,
elaborately artificial and adorned poem JUSTIFY its existence? Specifically,
how do the last lines of the poem purport to resolve the problem of the "rape"?
He did/She did: Who’s Nastier?
- Swift's "scatological poems" (BYN, LDR): Are
these poems from the middle of the eighteenth century still disgusting to
us in 2002? Why? What do these poems say about relations between men and women?
- Compare one of Swift's female figures to Milton’s Eve
or Pope’s Belinda. How does Swift take apart conventional gender roles ("femininity,"
"masculinity")?
- How does Swift use the figure of the narrator in these
poems to ironize various positions and assertions?
- How succesful is MWM’s rebuttal to Swift’s poem? What
does she take his target to be, and how does she counter it?
Pastoral Upside Down: Urban Versions
Review the definition of "pastoral" and the Ovid
passage on the Four Ages in the Course Reader.
- Why might late British poets and their readers be interested
in imagining such a happy, primitive (Edenic?) society at this historical
moment?
- How do the works we are reading as "urban pastorals"
rewrite or translate such images of a Golden Age? How are high and low, natural
and cultural, mixed up here?
- The Beggar's Opera: What kinds of images are used
to describe women (watch especially for flowers, gold, animals)?
- What definitions of the family and of society are offered?
- How are eros and commerce related throughout the text?
-Again, how is the hero being redefined?
Historical
contexts: party-based "machine politics" exploited by Robert Walpole,
England's first real prime minister; intensifying urbanization; expansion
of trade and colonization.
On the Production Line: “A Modest Proposal”
- How many different kinds of technical jargon can you find,
from such specialized fields as political economics, animal husbandry, statistics,
agronomy? Why does the narrator use these terms?
- If these terms can be transferred (perverted?) from their
"proper" applications, what happens to words like "virtue"
and "patriot"? What happens to human beings?
- How is the narrator morally implicated in what's
happening in this text?
Historical
contexts: Over centuries of colonial rule (from 1171!), English rulers seized
Irish Catholic property and redistributed it to English Protestants, many
of whom stayed in England as "absentee landlords"and “racked” their
tenants for maximum rent. Swift was Dean of St. Patrick's, Dublin, a plum
in the established (English) Protestant church hierarchy.
Gray’s and Collins’s Poetry of Dislocation
- Consider the poetic genres invoked in the titles of these
poems: ode and elegy. Review the definitions given in
the Course Reader and look them up in a handbook of literary terms. Why might
a poet choose these poetic types? What expectations are set up by these generic
choices?
- Watch for images of retreat or withdrawal, passivity,
enclosure, and loss. What sort of reader are these poems addressed to? How
could you describe the speakers or narrators of these poems?
- What kinds of settings (places, time of day) do we find
here? What -- if anything -- happens in these poems?
- Think about the poet's sense of his/her public role and
his/her readers in works by Finch, Pope, Swift, Behn. Do these poems address
the same kind of public issues? If
not, what kinds of problems do they pose (and are these resolved within the
poem)?
The
Castle of Otranto: Gothic Transgressions
- Gothic narratives are driven by transgression, by border
crossings between the natural and the supernatural, the human and the object
world. When do things, objects, get animated? How, conversely, do people get
depersonalized or "thingified"? How do people come to resemble other
people?
- What happens to conventional notions of the family --
who is a "father" here? In what sense?
- In Oroonoko, is Surinam a "new World"?
How is it like Milton's Eden? How are bodies like texts here (colors, tattoos,
costumes)?
- How are eros and commerce (including the slave trade)
connected here? Does Oroonoko constitute an argument against slavery?
- Who's a hero here? How is heroism being redefined?
- What signals does this text give about its generic identity
(travel narrative, romance, criminal biography, saint's life, political allegory?)
- How does the relation of the narrator to the events recounted
here shift?
- In Franklin’s “Remarks,” try to identify the point where
the hierarchical relation of civilization
vs. savages gets reversed.
How does Franklin use the “savages of North America” to critique Anglo-European
culture? Compare the “Remarks” to Oroonoko on this point.
Imperial Pastoral: “Windsor Forest”
- Beginning at line 11, the narrator describes the forest
as if he were showing us a landscape painting -- why? More broadly speaking,
what is the relation between the natural and the cultural in this poem?
- Examine the allusions to war, hunting, and rape in this
poem (for ex., the Lodona story): how does the poem deal with violence? How
does Pope rewrite nature and culture around the idea and imagery of gold?
Historical
contexts: Treaty of Utrecht ends war and allocates trade rights (including
slave trade).
- What does it mean to “declare” something? Who is understood
to be doing the “declaring” here? What is the ontological status of this odd
document – is it a text or an act? Is it recording something that has already
happened, or is it “performative” – enacting what it describes?
-Consider the long section that itemizes some of the “injuries
and usurpations” committed by the king against the colonies. How do the individual
points relate to one another? Is there an internal logic at work here, or
is this more like a grocery list? What (if anything) holds this piece of writing
together?
Speaking “American”: Translations and Self-Inventions
- Belinda’s ex-master’s first name seems almost too good to be true, doesn’t it? How does Belinda (and/or her representatives) position her claim within the broader political framework of claims and counter-claims?
- How does Wheatley claim poetical legitimacy, given her complex, multiply disenfranchised legal and social position as a female slave?