Sonnet Handout

Good Afternoon Everyone,

Thank you for your stimulating contributions today on William Wordsworth's sonnet, "The world is too much with us." I enjoyed hearing the connections you observed between the socio-historical contexts of indsutrialization and this primary Romantic-period text.

Below you will find the sheet on sonnets that I had up on the overhead.

Best of luck with your readings and preparations for the upcoming test, scheduled to take place during our tutorial next Monday, January 31.

Ciao,
Ada


EN246Sonnets_Handout

Hello Everyone,

Michaela and I are also presenting on Monday on Industrialization and William Wordsworth's poem "The World is Too Much With Us." We will give a brief summary of what Industrialization is and then we will be relating the Industrial Revolution to both the poem we are discussing in tutorial and the poems for Wednesday's lecture. Below is a link we have found that summarizes and analyzes the poem "The World is Too Much With Us" which we will go over in tutorial and we will also supply this kind of summary for the other poems that we feel fit with the theme of Industrialization.

http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/Guides3/WorldIsTooMuch.html

“The World is Too Much With Us” is a poem describing the negative aspects of industrialization. The poem praises nature and points out how the rise in materialism, productivity and commercial activity reduced one’s admiration of nature. For example in the poem it says that: “Getting and Spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!” (Black et al. 2008:142). We will discuss the contents of this poem and why this quote and others specifically relate to industrialization in our presentation tomorrow.

http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/tuttle.labor.child.britain

This website contains information regarding child labour during industrialization in England, and how children were exploited in large factories for cheap labour. This relates to "The World is Too Much With Us" because Wordsworth discusses the negative impacts of industrialization and how it caused damange to humans (especially people that were exploited in factories).

We look forward to discussing this information in depth with you on Monday.

Works Cited

Eds. Black, Jose, Leonard Collony, Kate Flint, Isobel Grundy, Don LePan, Roy Liuzza, Jerome xxxxJ, McGann, Anne Lake Prescott, Barry V. Qualls, Claire Waters. The Broadview Anthology xxxxof British Literature, Concise Edition, Volume B. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, xxxx2008.

Randi & Michaela

"The World is Too Much With Us"

Hello there,
Alexandra and I are presenting on Monday for the William Wordsworth poem "The World is Too Much Within Us" and I found online an interesting and helpful start to understanding the poem:

http://www.wsu.edu/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_2/wordsworth.html

This link will not only give you a bit of background on the poem concerning some of Wordsworth's themes and literary ideologies but will also help to clarify some of the references that should come in handy when we analyze the poem on Monday.

I hope you find it useful and that it helps to clarify some of Wordsworth's poem, the rest we'll take a look at in Monday as a class.

Cheers, Alexa and Alexandra.

The Scandal of the Season, indeed

In 2007, Sophie Gee published her first novel, The Scandal of the Season. Gee is an Australian-born academic who studied eighteenth-century British literature at Harvard, and her first novel clearly takes its inspiration from her scholarly interests.

The novel is a fictional account of the real-life events which inspired Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock. Gee's text richly evokes the Augustan period, its fashions, homes, food, all set amidst the madly competitive literary circles of ubran London. Most of the characters are based upon real historical figures, and Gee makes the period come alive through their narratives. There is also a pretty steamy romance between (who else) the fair Arabella Fermor and the very dashing Lord Petre.

Kathryn Hughes, who reviwed Gee's novel for The Guardian, scoffs that in The Scandal of the Season, "Sophie Gee has rewritten [The Rape of the Lock] for the kind of people who keep up to date with the Prince William/Kate Middleton saga, even though they pretend otherwise."

Ouch.

New York Times reviewer Jessica Grose is a little more balanced in her article; she contextualizes both Pope's poem and Gee's novel within the broader sociocultural paradigms of celebrity, gossip, and trashy headlines.

When I read this novel, The Rape of Lock took on a new level of significance for me: Gee portrays Pope's text not simply as a clever social satire, but a public document which bears testimony to the people Alexander Pope knew and the personal circumstances in which he lived and worked.

All this raises the question: what can historical fiction (and, I add, period films) do - and not do - for our understanding and reception of primary literay texts?

Presentation Groups

Hello Everyone,

Here you will find a list of the presentation groups (along with your presentation date and topic). This information is current as of Monday, January 10 at 1:00pm.

Please let me know next week in tutorial if this list requires correction.

Thanks!
Ada


En 246 Tutorial 1

Welcome!

Welcome to the tutorial blog! I look forward to everyone's contributions on this site and in class as we march our way through roughly 250 years of British literature and cultural production.

The primary texts for this course are The Broadview Anthology of British Literature (Concise Edition, Vols. A & B) and Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel Jane Eyre (the Broadview edition).

This blog will invite you to explore several other cultural forms, such as film, virtual museums, music, and images, which will inform our studies of British literary history from the Restoration to Modernist periods.

Best with your reading and the Winter 2011 term.

See you in class!
Ada

Here you will find the tutorial outline available to download and print.


EN246TutOutline_1_2