Wicked Women Schedule

PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE PERCENTAGE OF YOUR GRADE ON CANVAS. IT HAS NO RELATION TO YOUR FINAL GRADE.

Make sure sure you order copies of one of the critical editions below, or buy an e-book, or rent a copy, etc.

One Discussion Questions (DQs, 100 words max) and Two Big Words (or the two shots if we're watching a film) are due every Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday by 5:00 p.m. unless otherwise noted. Please be aware that the closing time on canvas is 5:00 p.m. Canvas will not allow you to submit work after the closing time. So do manage your time well.

YOUR FIRST ASSIGNMENT is due JANUARY 14 by 5:00 p.m. Post your DQs and three BIG WORDS BOTH on this Google doc

Please be aware that the closing time on canvas is 5:00 p.m. Canvas will not be able to submit work after the closing time. So do manage your time well.

I will give a brief quiz at the beginning of class. If you miss the quiz, I count you absent.

You will be counted absent if you do not turn in the DQs on time Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. No late work is accepted. I allow two unexcused absences. Three or four absences will impact your final grade at my discretion. More than four absences means you will fail the course. See the Attendance policies for this course.

UF gives you access to a large streaming collection here:

Swank Digital Campus – Swank provides access to feature films and documentaries.

You usually learn to figure how to do something. You know where you're going befire you get there. Learning how to read literature does not work this way. The point of reading literature is that it will surprise you. It will not come out the way you might have expected. And so you have to stay with the text and read it closely, even reread it.

Literature may not make you a better person. But it may make you a better reader.

This will be a discussion class, not a lecture, and I encourage you to befriend each other by meeting on group on and by continuing discussion after class.

If you have a question or a problem in urgent need of resolution, please contact me in class or at [email protected].

Requirements: Class participation; quizzes; co-lead class discussion three time; two 500-700 word papers; and two discussion questions and three BIG WORDS for each class.

TENTATIVE SCHEDULE (Please expect adjustments to be made in the schedule from time to time.)

January 13 Non-Binary Literature Outloud: Who writes? Who speaks? Try Listening to Audio recordings. How many voices do you her? How do you hear characters specking when you read silently? "Wicked" in this courese is not the opposite of Good (Evil). Men at the Margins: One Subject/ivity

Wicked Women in Literature and Film: Who Are They? And What Did They Do? Banned Books / Imprisonment / Newgate Jail

Non-Binary Literature: Moral Problem (Conduct Manuals for young women, and cautionary tales women who are sometimes warned against reading novels with women characters who are bad / obscene / criminals (thieves; murderers; bigamists) but finally repentant (or are they?). Daniel Defoe is aware that the narrators of Roxana and Moll Flanders could be judged (perhaps correctly) by some readers to be obscene and immoral. Bad characters go to Newgate jail; Jail Punishment of criminal characters by transportation to the colonies, jail, or hanging. The editor and Moll both assert there is a moral in the novel. Is there? To address these questions and contradiction, we will examine Synatx and Puncuation; Narration and Voice: Male author (anonymous); frame narrative (preface as apologia) written by male editor, or Prologue spoken by the narrator (we can include Chaucer's Prologue to the Wife of Bath's Tale), or letters exchanged; female narrator of an autobiography supposedly truthful and written by her; first person speaker and third person (omniscient) narration; self-censorship by the writer and by the narrator (do we get the whole story); the threats of state censorship or book banning,and punishment of the author with the pillory or imprisonment. Not until 1966 did the U.S. Supreme Court rule that John Cleland's Fanny Hill was not obscene. NY Times 1964 on British cenorship of the novel.

Lady / Corporate Feminism vs. Revolutionary Feminism: Literary Critics and Historians of the book remain trapped inside the dead end of a binary opposition between two predictable, judgmental labels: on the one hand, you have pejoratives like "misogynistic"; "sexist" and on the other, you have agenda free, no content corporate labels like "strong women"; "leaders"; "firsts"; "representation"; "intersectionality; "voices"; and "agency." No reading or reflection required.

1 "Experience, though noon auctoritee
"Experience, though no written authority
2 Were in this world, is right ynogh for me
Were in this world, is good enough for me

Geoffrey Chaucer, "Wife of Bath's Prologue" interlinear modern translation of Chaucer's Middle English (1387-1400)

129 Why sholde men elles in hir bookes sette
Why else should men set in their books
130 That man shal yelde to his wyf hire dette?

816 And made hym brenne his book anon right tho.
And made him burn his book immediately right then.

Geoffrey Chaucer, "Wife of Bath's Prologue" interlinear modern translation of Chaucer's Middle English

Geoffrey Chaucer, "Wife of Bath's Tale" interlinear modern translation of Chaucer's Middle English

To sign up to co-lead class beginning January 29, go to this google doc. Do not co-lead with the same person twice and co-lead at least four weeks after the first time you co-lead.

Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker; Ed. Kelly Stage or Jennifer Panek, The Roaring Girl (1611)

READ THROUGH THIS WEBPAGE. READ ALL OF IT. CLOSELY. VERY CLOSELY. PLEASE NOTE: Now that you have learned from your mistakes in our discussion of your first paper, and now that you have practiced writing three times a week through your DQs, I fully expect you to be able to make an argument in your essay, write grammatical sentences, use words properly, and punctuate properly. Papers that have ungrammatical sentences, mispunctuate, or misuse words will get "D" grades. Be sure to give yourself time to revise and to proofread your paper carefully before you send it to me at [email protected]. I recommend reading your work aloud. It's a good way to see what you need to revise. You can also get help at the Writing Program. See also the Plain Style: A Guide to Written English. READ THROUGH THIS WEBPAGE. READ ALL OF IT. CLOSELY. VERY CLOSELY.

Live GRADING in 4314 Turlington. We will meet at my office in person to discuss your assignment. I will send out an email with a link to a google with a schedule of times we can meet. You'll just need to sign up.

Swank Digital Campus – Swank provides you access to feature films and documentaries.

Judith C. Brown's acclaimed book, Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy

SECOND PAPER DUE March 15 by 11:59 p.m. READ THROUGH THIS WEBPAGE. READ ALL OF IT. CLOSELY. VERY CLOSELY. PLEASE NOTE: Now that you have learned from your mistakes in our discussion of your first paper, and now that you have practiced writing twice a week through your DQs, I fully expect you to be able to make an argument in your essay, write grammatical sentences, use words properly, and punctuate properly. Papers that have ungrammatical sentences, mispunctuate, or misuse words will get "D" grades. Be sure to give yourself time to revise and to proofread your paper carefully before you send it to me at [email protected]. I recommend reading your work aloud. It's a good way to see what you need to revise. You can also get help at the Writing Program. See also the Plain Style: A Guide to Written English. READ THROUGH THIS WEBPAGE. READ ALL OF IT. CLOSELY. VERY CLOSELY.

April 7

April 9

Denis Diderot, The episode about Madame de la Pommeraye in Jacques the Fatalist (Oxford World's Classics), pp. 3-136

Published as a stand alone excerpt as A Woman's Vengeance. The French original is here:

April 11

Denis Diderot, The episode about Madame de la Pommeraye in Jacques the Fatalist (Oxford World's Classics), pp. 3-136.

April 14

Suggested Viewing / Reading: (it's in French, but even if you don't speak French you may learn something from it):

Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Translated by Raymond N. MacKenzie, "A Woman's Revenge," in Diaboliques Six Tales of Decadence (2015), pp. pp. 225-61

Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Translated by Raymond N. MacKenzie, "A Woman's Revenge," in Diaboliques: Six Tales of Decadence (2015), pp. 225-61

Read any interview? with Lore Segal and she’ll tell you about her shortcomings:

There is no false modesty here, more a persistent self-reckoning. As she also liked to say, ‘there are things that I have accomplished and things I failed to do.’

"The Rise and Fall — and Rise? — of Close Reading On John Guillory’s new history of a contested technique."

The French have for a word for women readers: la liseuse. There are numerous paintings entitled "a woman reading."

What is she thinking? A woman reading aloud to who knows? Another woman? / A man reading to a woman?

Non-Binary Literature Outloud: Who writes? Who speaks? How do you imagine the voice of a character narrating or speaking? How would you read a novel outloud? Listen to Audio recordings.

"All possible care, however, has been taken to give no lewd ideas, no immodest turns in the new dressing up of this story; no, not to the worst parts of her expressions. To this purpose some of the vicious part of her life, which could not be modestly told, is quite left out, and several other parts are very much shortened. What is left ’tis hoped will not offend the chastest reader or the modest hearer [Note on "modest hearer" by G.A. Starr: "novels were very frequently read aloud in families," p. 288, Oxford World Classics]; and as the best use is made even of the worst story, the moral ’tis hoped will keep the reader serious, even where the story might incline him to be otherwise. To give the history of a wicked life repented of, necessarily requires that the wicked part should be make as wicked as the real history of it will bear, to illustrate and give a beauty to the penitent part, which is certainly the best and brightest, if related with equal spirit and life."

". . . much of the work of
recovery of early women writers has not progressed in the directions
that Hobby indicates. Rather, the prevailing trend has been
tantamount to the recovery of morally pure, suffering subjects
whose goodness is legible in the terms that Hobby reveals. Hence,
the earliest kind of studies of women-the tradition of Women
Worthies, as Natalie Zemon Davis labeled this approach, or what I
am calling here the legend of good women-remains strongest
among literary historians. What to be done with these writers beyond
proclaiming their virtue-has translated into an endeavor
whose conservatism is easily marked, indeed perhaps is implicit in
any attempt aimed at recovery, which is definitionally an act of
conservation: the desire to make canonical space for these writers,
to "counterbalance the canon," as one recent anthology offers as its
goal. One question, Hobby notes, that she was often asked about
her authors was "Were they any good?" Rejecting the question out
of hand for its complicity with "dominant literary and educational
cultures" and for the ways in which so-called "good writing" supports
the values of "white, heterosexual, middle-class men" (p. 25),
Hobby's refusal of the canonical issue raises difficult questions:
Must the inclusion of these texts in the canon necessarily support
dominant values and the oppressive regimes they foster? .. . .

The first of these questions is implicated in a recent and ambitious
volume, Barbara Kiefer Lewalski's Writing Women in Jacobean
England. One has to be struck by the fact that every chapter nominates
its literary subject as a "first" -Rachel Speght is "the first
Englishwoman to identify herself, unmistakably and by name, as a
polemicist and critic of contemporary gender ideology" (p. 153);
Elizabeth Cary is not only "the first Englishwoman to write a
tragedy," but also "the first Englishwoman to write a full-scale history"
(p. 179); Aemilia Lanyer is "the first Englishwoman to publish
a substantial volume of original poems" (p. 213); Mary Wroth
writes "the first prose romance and the first sonnet sequence"
(p. 243); these "firsts" add up to a group of women commandeering
traditional forms and genres. Many of these "firsts" arc fudged in
their qualifications-what docs "substantial" or "original" mean?
What is the value of a name? Why privilege print over manuscripts?
Why ignore continental precedents? One is struck, too, by
Lewalski's continuing evaluative gestures, and, as Margaret Ferguson
notes acutely in a review of the book, by the ways in which
these always qualified affirmations of value continually measure
these texts against "male" standards of literary performance and
with an eye to high canonical values; so, too, Lewalski's book imagines
its readership to be men who need to be convinced that these
texts brywomen are worth their attention. Lewalski's rhetoric, Ferguson
concludes, concedes much; indeed, "some feminists will feel
it's the whole shop." How is one to argue the value of these texts?
How are these texts to be read in the English Renaissance?
These questions are approached in the two chapters . . . ."

1919

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Daniel Defoe: A Brief Chronology
Defoe’s Times: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text

Early American Literature, Vol. 54, No. 1 (2019), pp. 163-188

The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home

Abigail Williams

Series: The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History

Published by: Yale University Press

Chloë E. Novel Reading in the Eighteenth Century

Why Be Good?

Also known as That’s a Bad Girl in the USA
(1929) United States of America B&W : Eight reels / 7507 feet Directed by William A. Seiter

The Last Mistress, dir. Catherine Breillat, 2008)

You always remember your last Roger Ebert July 17, 2008

‘Witches’ Review: Redeeming the Wicked Witch The director Elizabeth Sankey’s experience with postpartum depression anchors this documentary about the pop-cultural representation of witches. (2024)

Melissa Mowry, THIEVES, BAWDS, AND COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY FANTASIES: The Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith
THE JOURNAL FOR EARLY MODERN CULTURAL STUDIESVol. 5, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2005)

Emily the Criminal (dir. John Patton Ford, 2022)

Eliza Haywood (Author), Alexander Pettit (Editor), Fantomina and Other Works

The British recluse: or, the secret history of Cleomira, suppos'd dead. A novel By Mrs. Eliza Haywood, 1722

LA RELIGIEUSE (The Nun)

Un film de Guillaume Nicloux d’après l’œuvre de Denis Diderot Dossier

Chantal Thomas,Trans.Julie Rose The Wicked Queen: The Origins of the Myth of Marie-Antoinette

Selections from Henry Fielding, Jonathan Wild (Oxford World's Classics) Linda Bree and Hugh Amory (Editors)

Geoffrey Chaucer, "Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale" interlinear modern translation of Chaucer's Middle English

Recommended Reading:

Selections from Ralph Hanna and Traugott Lawler, Ed. Jankyn's Book of Wikked Wyves: Seven Commentaries on Walter Map's Dissuasio Valerii

Ralph Hanna and Traugott Lawler, Ed. Compiled by Karl Young and Robert A. Pratt Jankyn's Book of Wikked Wyves The Primary Texts

By God, if wommen hadde writen stories,
By God, if women had written stories,
694   As clerkes han withinne hire oratories,
As clerks have within their studies,
695   They wolde han writen of men moore wikkednesse
They would have written of men more wickedness
696   Than al the mark of Adam may redresse.
Than all the male sex could set right.

A_Woman's_Revenge_(1921)

Black Widow (dir. Bob Rafelson, 1987)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090738/

Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography & Censorship 1992 Edited by Beth Jaker (Author), Nan Hunter (Author), O'Dair (Author), Kate Ellis (Author), Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce (Editor), Abby Tallmer (Editor)

Carole Vance, Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (1984)

Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws (1992)

Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, and Modernity (1994)

"Current Challenges to Free Expression: A New Age of Repression" Geoffrey R. Stone 1991

Wendy Kaminer

Feminists Against the First Amendment A critique of a movement that is winning new recruits among politicians and on college campuses—a movement that appeals to the widespread loathing of pornography, that promotes a view of men as lubricious brutes, and that has united authoritarians on the left and the right in an assault on free speech

The Atlantic November 1992 Issue

L'histoire-de-mme-de-la-pommeraye-extrait-de-jacques-le-fataliste-diderot

https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k55448751/f160.image

L’Histoire de Mme de La Pommeraye – l’épisode le plus célèbre de Jacques le Fataliste et son maître (1796) – est un magnifique conte cruel. C’est le récit de la vengeance d’une femme trahie, qui fait cruellement payer à son amant libertin son désamour, en lui jetant comme appât une jeune prostituée dont il tombe malgré lui éperdument amoureux. Mais dans ce terrible jeu de manipulation, personne n’est vraiment celui qu’il semble être… Défense et illustration de la liberté des femmes à se faire justice elles-mêmes, plaidoyer en faveur de leur émancipation, ce texte est aussi le superbe portrait d’une femme indépendante.

Denis Diderot, The episode about Mme de la Pommeraye in Jacques the Fatalist (Oxford World's Classics), pp. 3-136

Denis Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist (Oxford World's Classics), pp. 137-244

Stephen Mautner, "The Story of the Compromised Author: Parabasis in Friedrich Schlegel and Denis Diderot," Comparative Literature Studies Vol. 16, No. 1, (1979), pp. 21-32.

Parabasis, Schelgel, Diderot

2. Michael Vande Berg, "Pictures of Pronunciation": Typographical Travels through Tristram Shandy and Jacques le Fataliste," Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Autumn, 1987), 21-47.

Recommended Reading:

Mary Norris, "Comma Queen" New Yorker March 2015

Laurence Sterne in France

Kate Tunstall, "Anonymity," or "*" as the anonymous author named Diderot, signing off with an asterisk as footnote

129 Why sholde men elles in hir bookes sette
Why else should men set in their books
130 That man shal yelde to his wyf hire dette?

1207   "Now, sire, of elde ye repreve me;
"Now, sir, of old age you reprove me;
1208   And certes, sire, thogh noon auctoritee
And certainly, sir, though no authority
1209   Were in no book, ye gentils of honour
Were in any book, you gentlefolk of honor
1210   Seyn that men sholde an oold wight doon favour
Say that men should be courteous to an old person
1211   And clepe hym fader, for youre gentillesse;
And call him father, because of your nobility;
1212   And auctours shal I fynden, as I gesse.
And authors shall I find, as I guess.

685   To reden on this book of wikked wyves.
To read in this book of wicked wives.
686   He knew of hem mo legendes and lyves
He knew of them more legends and lives
687   Than been of goode wyves in the Bible.
Than are of good women in the Bible.
688   For trusteth wel, it is an impossible
For trust well, it is an impossibility
689   That any clerk wol speke good of wyves,
That any clerk will speak good of women,
690   But if it be of hooly seintes lyves,
Unless it be of holy saints' lives,
691   Ne of noon oother womman never the mo.
Nor of any other woman in any way.

812   We fille acorded by us selven two.
We made an agreement between our two selves.
813   He yaf me al the bridel in myn hond,
He gave me all the control in my hand,
814   To han the governance of hous and lond,
To have the governance of house and land,
815   And of his tonge, and of his hond also;
And of his tongue, and of his hand also;
816   And made hym brenne his book anon right tho.
And made him burn his book immediately right then.

693   By God, if wommen hadde writen stories,
By God, if women had written stories,
694   As clerkes han withinne hire oratories,
As clerks have within their studies,
695   They wolde han writen of men moore wikkednesse
They would have written of men more wickedness
696   Than al the mark of Adam may redresse.
Than all the male sex could set right.

RECOMMENDED:

Fanny Hill (dir. Russ Meyers, 1964)

Fanny Hill (dir. Gerry O'Hara,1983)

Paprika (dir.Tinto Brass, 1991)

Some Considerations upon Street-Walkers. With a proposal for lessening the present number of them. In two letters to a Member of Parliament. To which is added, a letter from one of those unhappy persons, when in Newgate ... to Mrs.-in Great P-ney Street. [By D. Defoe?]

Fintan O’Toole, "Vile Bodies"
NYRB June 27, 2019 issue/

I tch, Clap, Pox: Venereal Disease in the Eighteenth-Century Imagination

by Noelle Gallagher

Yale University Press

Daniel Defoe, Conjugal Lewdness: or, Marital Whoredom (1727)

Roxana or, The Fortunate Mistress

Written by: Daniel Defoe
Edited by: Melissa Mowry

Publication Date: April 14, 2009

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Daniel Defoe: A Brief Chronology
Defoe’s Times: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text

Roxana

Appendix A: Roxana’s Shifting Identity and the Tradition of Whore Biography

From The Lawyer’s Clarke Trappan’d by the Crafty Whore of Canterbury (1663)
From The London Jilt (1683)
From The Whores Rhetorick (1683)

Appendix B:Women’s Work

A True Copie of the Petition of the Gentlewomen, and Tradesmens-Wives (1641)
Mary Collier, The Woman’s Labour: An Epistle to Mr. Stephen Duck (1739)

Appendix C: Court Culture

Poor-Whores Petition (1668)
The Gracious ANSWER … To the Poor-Whores Petition
(1668)
John Dunton, The Night-Walker (1696)

Appendix D: City Culture

The Character of a Town-Miss (1680)
Auction of Whores (1691)

Appendix E: The Great Debate on the Poor

From Matthew Hale, A Discourse Touching Provision for the Poor (1683)
From Thomas Firman, Some Proposals for the imployment of the Poor (1681)
From Daniel Defoe, The Poor Man’s Plea (1698)
From Daniel Defoe, Every-Body’s Business is No-Body’s Business (1725)
From Bernard Mandeville, Modest Defense of the Publick Stews (1724)
From Daniel Defoe, Some Considerations Upon Street-Walkers (1726)

Appendix F:Women and Marriage

From Mary Astell, Some Considerations on Marriage (1700/1706)
From Daniel Defoe, Conjugal Lewdness (1727)

Appendix G: Alternate Endings of Roxana

Daniel Defoe, The fortunate mistress (1740)
Daniel Defoe, The history of Mademoiselle de Beleau (1775)

Appendix H: Defoe, Roxana, and Posterity

From Charles Gildon, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Mr. Daniel Defoe (1719)
From The History of Mademoiselle de Beleau; or,The New Roxana (1775)
John Howlett, The Insufficiency of the Causes to which the Increase of the Poor’s Rates Have Been Commonly Ascribed (1788)
George Chalmers, The Life of Daniel Defoe (1790)
Thomas Ruggles, The History of the Poor (1797)
The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (1833)

Select Bibliography

Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure

Written by: John Cleland
Edited by: Richard Terry; Helen Williams
2018

List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
John Cleland: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text

Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure

Appendix A: Censorship and Its Repeal

Warrants for the Detention of Cleland and Others (1749)
Statement of Ralph Griffiths Taken before Lovel Stanhope, Law Clerk (13 November 1749)
Letter from Cleland to Lovel Stanhope, Law Clerk (13 November 1749)
John Nichols, Obituary of Cleland (February 1789)
Ruling of Supreme Court Justice Arthur G. Klein (23 August 1963)

Appendix B: Writing Sex

From The School of Venus (1680)
From Thomas Stretzer, A New Description of Merryland (1741)
From John Armstrong, The Oeconomy of Love (1745)
From the Trial of Francis Charteris for Rape (1730)
Trial of John Deacon and Thomas Blair for Sodomitical Practices (1743)
From Thomas Cannon, Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplify’d (1749)

Appendix C: Sexual Bodies

From Nicholas Venette, The Pleasures of Conjugal-Love Explain’d (1740?)
From William Cowper, The Anatomy of Humane Bodies (1737)
From La Mettrie, Man a Machine (1749)
From Cleland, Institutes of Health (1761)

Appendix D: Prostitution

From Cleland, The Case of the Unfortunate Bosavern Penlez (1749)
From Memoirs of the Celebrated Miss Fanny M— (1759)
From Genuine Memoirs of the Celebrated Miss Maria Brown (1766)
From Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies (1757–95)

Appendix E: Cleland’s Writings on the Novel

Review of Tobias Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle, Monthly Review (March 1751)
Review of Henry Fielding’s Amelia, Monthly Review (December 1751)
From The Dictionary of Love (1753)
From Commentary on Historical and Physical Dissertation on the Case of Catherine Vizzani (1751)

Select Bibliography

Recommended

Vanity Fair (2018 TV series) Episodes 1-3

NOT RECOMMENDED:

Vanity Fair (dir. Mira Nair, 2004 film)

John Ruskin's one sentence description of the Schaffhausen waterfall in Modern Painters (Vol. I, Part II):

“Stand for half an hour beside the fall of Schaffhausen, on the north side, where the rapids are long, and watch how the vault of water first bends, unbroken, in pure velocity, over the arching rocks at the brow of the cataract, covering them with a dome of crystal twenty feet thick, so swift that its motion is unseen except when a foam-globe from above darts over it like a fallen star; and how the trees are lighted above it under all their leaves, at the instant that it breaks into foam; and how all the hollows of that foam burn with green fire like so much shattering chrysopase; and how, ever and anon, startling you with its white flash, a jet of spray leaps hissing out of the fall, like a rocket, bursting in the wind and driven away in dust, filling the air with light; and how, through the curdling wreaths of the restless crashing abyss below, the blue of the water, paled by the foam in its body, shows purer than the sky through white rain-cloud; while the shuddering iris stoops in tremulous stillness over all, fading and flushing alternately through the choking spray and shattered sunshine, hiding itself at last among the thick golden leaves which toss to and fro in sympathy with the wild water; their dripping masses lifted at intervals, like the sheaves of loaded corn, by some stronger gush from the cataract, and bowed again upon the mossy rocks as its roar dies away; the dew gushing from their thick branches through drooping clusters of emerald herbage, and sparkling in white threads along the dark rocks of the shore, feeding the lichens which chase and chequer them with purple and silver.”

In this course, I will be asking you to learn how to do something no one may ever have asked you to do: it's called close reading. (Please do not confuse being moralistic and judgmental--"it didn't do 'x' and it should have done!"--with being critical--"why is the work doing what it is doing the way it is doing it?")."

Close reading means paying attention to language, to the words the author has used, the order in which they are used, and appreciating how well they are used. It means paying attention not to what is said but to how it is said; it means paying attention to the structure of sentences and the structure of the narrative; it means paying attention to tropes such as metaphor, metonymy, and irony, among others; it means being alert to allusions a work of literature makes to other works of literature.

See Cleanth Brooks, "The Heresy of Paraphrase," in The Well-Wrought Urn.

Close reading is a practice designed for literature, for texts that are extremely well-written. Literature is universal. Literature is often difficult to write. And it is often difficult to read. Not just anyone can write it. And not just anyone can read it closely. (If you do not know how to write a grammatical sentence or how to punctuate or how to use words correctly, you cannot learn how to read closely.) All writers of literature are excellent close readers. They know humongous amounts of (big) words.

Do not ask about the author or the historical context. Do not ask speculative questions. They cannot be answered and so are not productive for discussion. Do not ask what the work tells us about some general issue today. Ask questions the work raises.

Predatory Reading vs. Literary Criticism

How to Read a Book 1940 edition

How to Read a Book 1966 edition

How To Read A Book 1972 Edition

Guy J. Williams, "Harkness Learning: Principles of a Radical American Pedagogy"

Harkness table

"What we must not forget, however, is that it is in the completion of the text by the reader that these adjustments are made; and each reader will make them differently. Plurality is here not a prescription but a fact. There is so much that is blurred and tentative, incapable of decisive explanation; however we set about our reading, with a sociological or a pneumatological, a cultural or a narrative code uppermost in our minds, we must fall into division and discrepancy; the doors of communication are sometimes locked, sometimes open, and Heathcliff may be astride the threshold, opening, closing, breaking. And it is surely evident that the possibilities of interpretation increase as time goes on. The constraints of a period culture dissolve, generic presumptions which concealed gaps disappear, and we now see that the book, as James thought novels should, truly "glories in a gap," a hermeneutic gap in which the reader's imagination must operate, so that he speaks continuously in the text.

Barthes denies the charge that on his view of the reading process one can say absolutely anything one likes about the work in question; but he is actually much less interested in defining contraints that in asserting liberties.

When we see that the writer speaks more than he knows what we mean is that the text is under the absolute control of no thinking subject, or that it is not a message from one mind to another."

--Frank Kermode, "A Modern Way with the Classic"
New Literary History Vol. 5, No. 3 (Spring, 1974), pp. 415-434; pp. 425; 432; 433

The reason literature, film, and philosophy are so great, so deeply admired yet often controversial, even despised, is that writers are free to say anything they wish they way they want to say it, fillmakers get to show images of anything they wish, they way they want to show them, and philosophers can ask philosophical questions about anything they wish whenever they want. It's called FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION. As anyone who understands anything about language knows, intention and context do matter. I find attempts to get people fired from their jobs because of something they said repellent and unseemly.

TENTATIVE SCHEDULE (Please expect adjustments to be made in the schedule from time to time; all changes will be announced both in class and on the class email listserv.)

In order to include all students in class discussion, and in order to make it easier for you to read closely and thereby improve your own writing, We will close read, read slowly the assigned text sentence by sentence or the assigned film shot by shot. Discussion co-leaders and I will call on a student at random and ask that student to read a specific sentence out loud and then to close read it. If the student is unable to read the sentence closely, the co-leaders will call on another student and ask that student to read a specific sentence out loud and then to close read it. We will continue to discuss the same sentence until a student reads it closely. We will then proceed in the same fashion with the next sentence. And so on. Due to time constraints and because close reading is slow reading, we will skip parts of the assigned text, but we will always be talking and only be talking about words, syntax, punctuation, paragraphing, and narration in the text. As we move through the text, we will be able to make more general comments about parts of it. If students have comments to add on the sentence under discussion, they may raise their hands and make them once they have been called on by the co-leaders or me.

In order to learn the names of all the students in the class, I will take roll on canvas at the beginning of class. As I state on the requirements webpage, if you are late to class, I consider you absent. If you are absent more than twice, your final grade may suffer. If you are absent four times, you fail the class.

Here is what I have written on the requirements webpage:

"Attendance means not only being in class, but includes completing the assigned work for each class by the time it is due and arriving to class on time. (If you arrive late to class or if you don't do the discussion questions, you are counted as absent.)

Repetition is key to learning.

To learn how to understand a piece of music, a philosopher said, you have to hear it twice.

A conductor of baroque music said you have to listen to repeated hearings before you understand it.

"How full of meaning and significance the language of music is we see from the repetition of signs, as well as from the Da capo which would be intolerable in the case of works composed in the language of words. In music, however, they are very appropriate and beneficial; for to comprehend it fully, we must hear it twice."

--Arthur Schopenhauer, "On the Metaphysics of Music"

Vienna and Schubert: 'Death and the Maiden' String Quartet - Professor Chris Hogwood CBE

"The greatest pieces of music are called classics simply because at a first hearing--that is terribly...very complicated to work out what's going on or even more complicated to explain to yourself why it's going on--even to hear it has to be heard several times. Probably after first hearing, immediately go back and hear it again, and on repeated hearings repeated things come to light."

--Christopher Hogwood