Romantic Apocalypse
Instructor: M. Levy
SPRING 2007
John Martin, The Last Man (1849)Instructor: Michelle Levy Meeting Time: T and Th 3:30-5:20
E-mail: mnl@sfu.ca Classroom: WMC 3513
Telephone: 291-5393 Office Hours: T 1:30-3:20
Office: AQ 6110 and by appointment
During the Romantic period (1770s-1830s), many Britons believed that the world was in imminent peril, whether because of the explosive violence of political tyranny, the dangers of uncontrolled population growth, the threat of rampant urban development, or the fear that technology would ultimately destroy or mar more human lives than it would save. By examining each of these major threats (political violence, population growth, ecological crisis, and technological change), we will survey the range of literary responses that Romantic-era authors put forward in their efforts to understand and stave off catastrophe. Major authors to be considered include William Blake, William Wordworth, S. T. Coleridge, Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, Percy Shelley, and Mary Shelley whom we will take up alongside a range of remarkable contemporaneous writing on political economy, political history, and natural history. As part of our attempt to evaluate Romantic-era narratives about apocalypse, we will also look to several later nineteenth-century authors (including Ruskin and Thoreau) as well as our own present-day rhetoric of collapse. One of the primary questions we will ask is, what makes apocalyptic narratives particularly “Romantic”? To what degree was Romanticism itself a highly charged, fearful response to modernity?
REQUIRED TEXTS:
The Broadview Anthology of English Literature, Volume 4: “The Age of Romanticism”
Mary Shelley, The Last Man (Broadview)
Felicia Hemans, The Siege of Valencia (Broadview)
**students will receive some reading material in the form of handouts and will also be required to retrieve extensive online materials**
RECOMMENDED TEXTS:
Diane Hacker, A Canadian Writer’s Reference (3d) (Bedford/St. Martins)
M.H. Abrams, Glossary of Literary Terms (8th ed, Heinle)
COURSE REQUIREMENTS:
10% Participation
10% First Paper (5-7 pages) (Due Feb. 6)
15% Revision of First Paper (5-7 pages) (Due Feb. 22)
20% Two Presentations and Write-ups (2 pages each)
10% Final Paper Proposal and Annotated bibliography (Due March 6)
15% Final Essay (12 pages) (Due March 20)
20% Revised Final Essay (Due April 5)
COURSE POLICIES:
Participation:
As a seminar course, active and engaged class participation is necessary for everyone, though I am looking for quality, not quantity. You must do all of the required reading and must come to class prepared to discuss what you have read.
Presentations:
You will make two presentations for the course, each one counting for 10% of your final grade. Both presentations will require you to read/view a more contemporary work and to relate it to the course readings. You will be asked to sign up for a presentation on the second day of classes. If you have another work in mind for one of your presentations, please discuss it with me (approval must be given beforehand). Presentations should be no more than 10 minutes, which should include some discussion, led by you. You will be asked to post a brief (no more than 2 pages) synopsis of your presentation on webct within a week afterwards.
Essays:
As this is a writing intensive class, you will spend a great deal of time writing and revising your papers. Guidelines for these papers will be given to you; however, because this is a 400-level course, you will be expected to develop your own paper topics, and to engage in research on your chosen topic.
All papers are due on the dates listed in the class schedule. Because we are on a tight time-line for revisions, there can be no exceptions; late papers will not be accepted. You are encouraged to read ahead if you think there are works appearing later in the course upon which you might like to write your final paper.
All papers must be presented in proper form: they must be typed, double spaced, one inch margins, 12 point font size, with page numbers, a title. Your name, your TA’s name, date and class information must appear clearly on the first page of your paper (please no separate title pages). Double-sided papers are encouraged (to save paper)
Plagiarism:
The MLA Style Manual defines plagiarism as “the use of another person’s ideas or expressions in your own writing without acknowledging the source.” Plagiarism is a serious academic offence that will be reported to the Dean of Students, and can result in expulsion. If you plagiarize, you will be given a zero on that paper and may also fail the course. Please ask me if you have any questions about how to document your sources.
Tentative Course Schedule
Jan 9: Introducing Apocalypse
• “The Age of Romanticism” (xxxiii-xli)
I. The Fall of Empires
Jan. 11: Imagining Collapse
• Anna Barbauld, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812) (3-8)
• Coleridge, “Kubla Khan” (1798, 1816) (328)
• Percy Shelley, “Ozymandias” (1818) (627)
• Keats, “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” (707)
• Jared Diamond, Collapse (handout)
Jan. 16: Theorizing Progress and Decline
• Edward Gibbon, from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-78) (at
• V. F. Volney, from The Ruins; or, a Survey of the Revolutions of Empires (1795) (Chapters 10-11 at
• Porter, “Progress” from Creation of Modern World (handout)
P1: Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress (2005)
P2: Apocalypto (Gibson, 2006)
II. Malthus and Population Scare
Jan. 18:
• Malthus, “An Essay on Principle of Population” (1798) (handout) (at
• Paul Ehrlich, from The Population Bomb (handout)
• Specter, “The Last Drop: Confronting the possibility of a global catastrophe” (New Yorker 23 Oct. 2006) (handout)
P1: Johnson and Nolan, Logan’s Run (1967)
P2: Soylent Green (Fleisher 1976)
III. Political Violence
Jan. 23: Blake’s Revolutions
• Contexts (web 1-15)
• William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793) (44-55)
• M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 32-46 (handout)
P1: Biblical Apocalypse (Book of Daniel; Book of Revelation)
P2: Blake’s Illuminations
Jan 25:
• Blake, America a Prophesy (1793) (web 1-11)
• M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 329-47 (handout)
P1: Classical Prophesy (the Cassandra figure)
P2: Escape from NY/ Escape from LA (Carpenter, 1981/1996)
Jan. 30: Napoleon; Waterloo
• Contexts (web 15-26)
• Coleridge, “Fears in Solitude” (299-302)
• Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III (web 1-20
P1: H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898)
P2: Picasso, Guernica (1937)
Feb. 1: Peterloo
• P. Shelley, “The Mask of Anarchy”; “Song to the Men of England”: “England in 1819” (644-52)
• Context: The Peterloo massacre (661-69)
P1: Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
P2: Moore and Lloyd, V for Vendetta (1982-8)
Feb. 6:
Paper #1 Due
Feb. 13: Slavery
• Mary Prince, History of Mary Prince (1831) (478-503)
• Colley, from Britons Forging the Nation
Feb. 15:
• The Abolition of Slavery: Contexts (504-525)
• J.M.W. Turner, Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying (1840) (plate)
P1: Pierre Boulle, Planet of the Apes (1963)
P2: Planet of the Apes (Shaeffner 1968)
Feb. 20: The Victimization of Women and Children
• Charlotte Smith, from The Emigrants (webct)
• Mary Robinson, “All Alone” (64-6)
• W. Wordsworth, “The Thorn,” (195-8); “The Female Vagrant”
• Felicia Hemans, “Homes of England”; “Casabianca”; “The Effigies” (678, 680-3)
• Anna Barbauld, “Dialogue in the Shades” (at
P1: John Hersey, Hiroshima (1946); Schell, The Unfinished Twentieth Century (2001)
P2: If you Love this Planet (NFB 1982)
Feb. 22:
• Hemans, The Siege of Valencia (1823)
Revised Paper #1 Due
IV. Extinction: The Last Man Theme
Feb. 27: Precursors to Shelley’s Last Man
• Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (303-14)
• Byron, “Darkness” (530-1)
• Read all other “Last Man” works at
March 1: Shelley’s Last Man
• Context: The “Last Man” Theme in the Nineteenth-Century (778-80)
• Context: Shelley’s Life and The Last Man (781-90)
• Mary Shelley, The Last Man (1826)
P1: Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)
P2: Children of Men (Cuaron 2006)
March 6: Plague in the Last Man
• Mary Shelley, The Last Man (1826)
• Alan Bewell, “‘All the World Has the Plague’: Mary Shelley’s The Last Man” (2000)
P1: O.T. Nelson, The Girl who owned a City (1976)
P2: Dawn of the Dead (Romero 1978)
Paper #2 Outline and Annotated Bibliography Due
V. Environmental Threats
March 8: Rural Decline
• Oliver Goldsmith, “The Deserted Village” (1770) (at
• Wordsworth, “Preface”; “Michael”; “The Ruined Cottage” (199-200; 202-209; 213-219; 231-8); “Goody Blake and Harry Gill”; “(at
• Raymond Williams, from The Country and the City, 9-12; 72-9
P1: Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America (1977)
P2: Virginia Lee Burton, The Little House (1943)
March 13: Nature as Healer
• Wordsworth, “Expostulation and Reply”; “Tables Turned”; “Tintern Abbey”; “[There was a Boy”]; “[My Heart Leaps Up]”; “[I wandered lonely as a cloud]” (242-65; 200-2; 210; 224-5)
• John Clare (687-92)
• Raymond Williams, from The Country and the City, 127-41
P1: Callenbach, Ecotopia (1975)
P2: Nausicaa; Princess Mononoke (Miyazaki, 1984, 1997)
March 15: Urbanization/Consumerism
• Mary Robinson, “January, 1795”; “London’s Summer Morning” (1804) (61, 66)
• William Wordsworth, “Composed upon Westminster Bridge”; “[The World is too much with us]”; “London 1802”; “Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways” ((222-3; 238)
• William Morris, “William Morris, “The Lesser Arts” (1877); “Useful Work versus Useless Toil” (1884) (handout)
P2: Dr. Seuss, The Lorax (1971)
March 20: Industrialization
• William Blake, from Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789, 1794) (36-44)
• Charles Lamb, The Praise of Chimney Sweepers (web 1-5)
• Loutherbourgh, “Coalbrookdale by Night” (1801) (plate)
P1: An “industrial” novel (e.g. Dickens, Hard Times (1854); Gaskell, Mary Barton (1848)
P2: Manufactured Landscapes (Baichwal 2006)
Paper #2 Due
March 22: Ecological Degradation
• John Ruskin, “The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century” (1884) (handout)
• Kolbert, from Field Notes from a Catastrophe (2006)
P1: Brian Fagan, The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization (2004)
P2: An Inconvenient Truth (2006)
March 27: “Natural” Disasters
• Rev. Charles Davy, “The Earthquake at Lisbon 1755” (at
• Baillie, “Thunder” (135-6)
• Shelley, “Mont Blanc” (624-6)
• Hemans, “Image in Lava” (683)
• J.M.W. Turner, “The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grissons” (1810) (at
P1: Bill McGuire, A Guide to the End of the World (2002)
P2: Deep Impact (Leder 1998)
VI. Technophobia
March 29: Ludditism
• from Writings of the Luddites (c. 1810s) (on reserve)
P1: Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975)
P2: Carl Hiassen, Hoot (2004); and film (Shriner, 2006)
April 3: Technological Skepticism; Railways and Highways
• Byron, Don Juan, from Cantos 1 and 11 (555-6; 602-4); Canto XI (599-604)
• Thoreau, from Walden (1854) (webct)
• Emily Dickinson, “The Railway Train” (webct)
• J.M.W. Turner, “Rain, Steam, Speed”1844 (240 and at
• Mumford, “The City and the Highway” (handout)
P1: Huxley, Brave New World
P2: Metropolis (Lang 1927); The Village (Shyamalan 2004)
April 5: Biotechnology
• Mary Shelley, from Frankenstein (1818) (Chapters 4 and 5 at
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P1: Atwood, Oryx and Crake (2003); Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005)
P2: Blade Runner (Scott 1982)
Revised Paper #2 Due
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