Engl 201 Introduction to Literary Study

G. Thompson

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Notes for Aug. 29

Engl 201 is a requirement for three curricula, and is an uneasy fit for all of these. Probably a plurality of students here are education majors, especially elementary education majors, and their purpose is to get some feel for understanding literature at a different, adult level from the children's literature to be encountered later. A second group, creative writing students, are probably going to be thinking about the writers' craft, to see how fiction and poetry and perhaps drama are put together, in the process of building a tool-kit. A third group would be English majors and minors, who will use some of what we do here in subsequent classes. (Set aside the question of what you do with an English degree.) While these three purposes overlap--and students often change majors and minors--they may produce some very different reactions to our reading.

Engl 201, introduction to literary studies, is built around the three main literary genres, poetry, drama, and fiction. As a requirement for these three programs, the main purpose is to become more comfortable with the conventions for reading, thinking about, writing about, and talking about them in an academic setting. Some of these conventions you will have studied or absorbed in previous classes, and some of what we will do will be new to you. Some of this new or familiar material will be in the form of key terms, and for this semester (starting now) you should take notes of any key terms brought up in class--note them, stop me for an explanation, etc.

I've already used one such term, genre. [discuss]

Genre is a borrowed French word meaning kind or type. It used to be fairly technical, but now has crossed over into popular usage, as in genre fiction, meaning fiction of a specific type, such as adventure fiction, romance [another usefully problematic word], science-fiction, and so on.

As an introduction to literary studies, we are looking afresh at things we already know but perhaps haven't articulated and put together. The purpose is to become familiar with ways of understanding and talking about these kinds of texts. The assumption is that as students early in the process, you are to some extent outsiders who want to become insiders, at least to some extent. (My guess is that a plurality of Engl 201 students are ElEd majors, whose interest in being "inside" has more to do with teaching second-graders. But to do that, it will be helpful to encounter ways of thinking about literature more generally.)

Appreciation of literature is a secondary goal. Over the course, you will encounter some texts that you may not like, but that's OK. Art doesn't always want us to like it. Art (literature is a subset of art) is a way of coming to understand and reflect the human condition, whatever that might be, and it's not always pretty. But it's always something to talk about, in order to know humanity better, and to know something about ourselves in the process.

When we are younger, we are likely to be given stories to read which are a little like fables, perhaps with an explicit moral at the end, perhaps with one which is easy to extract. Be like this person, don't be like that person. The Cat in the Hat is a fun but dangerous presence in the household, and the kids have to take responsibility for undoing the trouble he causes. [more examples] These are age-appropriate, used in contexts to reinforce appropriate behavior, which is after all a primary purpose of school: children don't automatically think about others, and their spontaneity and inventiveness and imagination are part of what makes them fun to be around. But imagination takes a different form in literature intended for adults--we are less in need of sheltering from the darker sides of human experience. And art which explicitly teaches lessons is going to be dismissed as didactic: for moral lessons you should go to church or synagogue or mosque or some other teacher. Literature is sometimes disturbing, and not always for reasons which are on the surface: it often requires inference.

Inference in this context doesn't mean that there's a "hidden meaning" which the author has placed in the text for us to extract. It's not like one of those 3-D puzzles which you have to make yourself cross-eyed to see (and I was never good at those). The meaning comes in-between the text and us, and not all literary texts speak to all people. So one of the basic activities for us this semester will be speaking to others about what we are reading--speaking and writing, that is.

Why start with poetry? Some of what poetry does will serve us well in talking about fiction and drama: poems often have characters, either in the poem or speaking to us through the poem. Poems sometimes have plots. Poems give us visible examples of literary devices--symbol, metaphor, metonymy, personification, and others we will talk about. Poetry often uses verse, thereby calling attention to language. That's most important: because of its (usual) compression into a small space, poetry reminds us that every word, every phoneme, counts: poems draw a frame around some part of human experience, and say to us, Pay attention. Don't live a life of distraction, always looking ahead to some event which will transform your life (marriage, raising a family, getting a better job, or graduation, or the end of the semester). And don't waste (too much of) your consciousness on diversions--Twitter, Facebook, texting 100x / day, television, pop music . . .

Etymological roots are connected with poesis or making--poetry in ancient times was synonymous with literature. Poets make things, with words.

Poems are usually short--lyric poetry, not epic or dramatic--so we can see the entire thing all at once.

Poems invite close reading--you won't so much read a poem as re-read it, take it apart to see how it works and how it works on you. We read poems through ourselves, which means that there may be a range of responses and understandings, and it's important to this class to voice these.

Poems are made of language, and through poetry we may come to understand more about our language, which is not exclusively ours individually. A poem is an invitation to meditate upon words.

Poems foreground form. Form is less evident in drama and fiction, which are narrative genres. Poems may be narratives as well--narrative means that it tells a story--but narratives which play with their own structures and collectively derived structures.

This semester we are primarily (exclusively?) concerned with poems in English, mostly Anglo-American in origin. Poems in translation present special problems which we are not well equipped to address. (The best translations are likely to be more adaptations, using the resources and literary traditions of the target language [?] rather than remaining literal.)

Poetry in English, like other literary genres, has its own traditions and developments through history. Like music or fashion, poetry has its fads which come and go. For example, English poets in the 16th and 17th century adapted an Italian form, the sonnet, to English language; then sonnets went out of style until becoming popular again in the early 19th-century on into Victorian times, and in the 20th-c. were distinctly old-fashioned except for quirky types like e. e. cummings. Musical fads--name some? Clothing? Hair styles?

In reading poetry, we have to deal with a series of changes in rules for poems. We're focusing in this course on the English tradition and the American branch separating from it about the middle of the 19th century, with more substantial differences beginning about 1910. While this isn't a course in literary history, the history is relevant to what we are concerned with, which is how to understand and enjoy poems from all periods. Just as it helps in enjoying music to know something about musical history, or in understanding art to know about art history, so it helps to know a little something about literary history. (That's still ahead of us for now, but I'm mentioning this as part of the course overview.)

One of the profound changes between poetry before the early 20th century and after is the predominance of verse. Not all poetry is in verse, and probably most of the poetry you have read has been in free verse--no dominant rhythmic pattern. However, most of the poetry ever written in English was written in verse. (The el ed majors in class should pay particular attention, since a lot of children's books are in verse. Creative writing students may zone out, since most poets now don't bother with learning the craft of verse--but perhaps they should.)

Understanding meter as the principle of verse is like learning musical notation. If you are simply listening to music, you can do so without paying attention to the time signature, much less the genre and musical tradition which time signatures help to mark. (3/4 tells you that you may be listening to a waltz, for example.) But if you are performing music, you have to note the time signature, among other things. And as we read poetry, or any literature, we are in a sense performing it.

Some of what we will try for this semester involves a sense of history--both in terms of what was going on for writers at the time of composition and publication, what their works meant in that context, and in the sense that literary texts enter a kind of conversation with other literary texts, drawing their meanings from those and repurposing them. Music does the same thing, with Beethoven being in a conversation with Haydn and Mozart, Brahms with Beethoven, Wagner with Brahms, Debussy and Stravinsky with Wagner, and so on. (You can do the same thing with rock or pop if you like--I won't expose my ignorance in this area.)

Poetry has its own conversation, about form: beginning with the early 20th-century, poets in English, especially in America, began to move away from traditional meter, and most poetry written now avoids using meter in favor of free verse. But most poetry in the English canon, and much in the American, uses verse, so we have to get more or less comfortable with it.

What was initially described as a new freedom turns out to be a new responsibility: every poem has a form, but those writing in free verse have to create their new form from scratch rather than taking a ready-made. Both free verse and patterned verse offer opportunities for creativity, but with free verse you have to create the mold as well as what goes into it.

You see what I did there? Mold : poetic form : : sculpture : poem. That's an analogy, and we use analogies in discourse all the time. Analogy is a poetic / literary device, an extended comparison between two dissimilar things. (See glossary on A1 in the back of the anthology.) Emily Dickinson uses an analogy in a well-known poem, beginning "Because I could not stop for death--" 839 [ask them--the analogy is between death, the movement from life into an afterlife, and a journey in a coach.] Another example: Sharon Olds, "Sex Without Love," in the anthology on 827 (read) [ask them--here it's sex as an athletic competition]

We'll take a pause here for some feedback. I want you to take five minutes and a sheet of paper (not to be graded), and write for a bit: describe either one new thing that you have heard so far today, or one familiar thing that perhaps has a different slant or approach. I want to do something like this periodically in these classes, usually though not always to be turned in: I would like to use this as both a feedback mechanism for myself, so that I can make sure that key points are getting across, and as a way for you to cement some of what we've talked about. (Writing is an effective device for getting things into long-term memory.)
 
Some course logistics:

Informal writing assignment to be posted to Canvas by Friday.