Ashes Sparks & Hypertext syllabus

Instructor: Mark Phillipson
UC Berkeley, Spring 2000

CLASS DESCRIPTION

Romantic poets wrote at a time when printing and marketing practices were undergoing drastic upheavals. As a result, they were particularly unsettled about who their audience might be, and how that audience might receive their text. Some romantics anxiously tried to define reader engagement, while others found new freedom in the unpredictability and deviation of address.

Our seminar will concentrate on works representing important aspects of British romanticism. We'll read them closely to reconstruct their fantasies about audience, trace their actual adventures of publication, trace ways in which they were answered, ignored, or parodied, and finally consider new representations on the Internet. The Web, after all, is starting to shake up the shape and distribution of texts in ways that the romantics never dreamed.

Or did they? What happens to Wordsworth's poet, a "man talking to men," when the "talk" is cut into screens and the "men" are browsing? How might hyperlinks bear out Blake's prophesy of "a torn book"? What happens to the Shelleyan vision of poetry as "ashes and sparks," now that we can effortlessly store, retrieve, and reconfigure? And how might the intervention of "outsiders" onto the romantic text be illustrated today?

Work for the class will consist of the following. Each counts for 25% of the final grade:

Avid participation in class discussion throughout the term.

Numerous one-pagers, assigned in the class before they're due. Interesting one-pagers will be posted online.

One 4-5 page research report on the publication and distribution history of one item on our reading list, which will be posted online. This assignment will include a brief presentation to the class of a version of the work currently online.

One 8-10 page project that connects a close reading of a poem to a proposed new way of presenting it. This assignment will involve some kind of mapping (flow chart, venn diagram, matrix, etc.) as well as traditional argument. Some of these projects will also be posted online.

TEXTS

There is only one book to buy for this class:

Romanticism: An Anthology, second edition, edited by Duncan Wu (Blackwell).

All other material will be available online or - if need be - handed out

READING SCHEDULE