Week 1 INTRODUCTION
Wed. 4/3 On Sensibility and Madness

Week 2 PHILOSPHICAL BACKGROUND
Mon. 4/8 John Locke, from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Wed. 4/10 Swift, from A Tale of a Tub; Pope, from The Dunciad

Week 3 THE EXCHANGE OF SENTIMENT
Mon. 4/15 Sterne, A Sentimental Journey
Wed. 4/17 Sterne, A Sentimental Journey

Week 4 THE MAN OF FEELING
Mon. 4/22 MacKenzie, The Man of Feeling; Hogarth, “The Rake’s Progress”
Wed. 4/24 Austen, Love and Friendship
Week 5 SENSIBILITY BARDS & MAD POETS
Mon. 4/29 Thomas Gray, “Ode on a Prospect of Eton College; Elegy in a Country
Churchyard; Sonnet on the Death of Richard West; Charlotte Smith, from Elegiac Sonnets; Cowper, Hatred and Vengeance; The Cast-Away
Wed. 5/1 Christopher Smart, from Jubilate Agno
[PAPER ONE DUE IN SECTION]

Week 6 SATIRE OF SENSIBILITY
Mon. 5/6 Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience
Wed. 5/8 Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Week 7 THE POLITICS OF SENSIBILITY
Mon. 5/13 Wollstonecraft, from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Wed. 5/15 Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of The Rights of Woman

Week 8 A REVOLUTION IN TASTE
Mon. 5/20 Memorial Day: No class.
Wed. 5/22 Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (244-67)

Week 9 SENTIMENTAL EXPERIMENTS
Mon. 5/27 Wordsworth, The Female Vagrant, Goody Blake & Harry Gill, Simon
Lee, Anecdote for Fathers, We are Seven, The Thorn, The Idiot Boy,
The Mad Mother
Wed. 5/29 Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, The Nightingale

Week 10 SENSE AND SENSIBILITY
Mon. 6/3 Austen, Sense and Sensibility
Tuesday 6/4 at 7:00 pm: Film: Sense and Sensibility
Wed. 6/5 Austen, Sense and Sensibility
[PAPER TWO DUE IN SECTION]

COURSE REQUIREMENTS

1) Class participation, including weekly participation in web discussion forum (20%)
The success of this class will depend on active, lively engagement with the texts and their contexts, and thus attendance and spoken involvement is mandatory. Please consider the discussion section of lecture, as well as your own discussion section, a forum to formulate, develop, and challenge your own ideas.

In addition to the aboveyou will be asked to post a brief weekly message to the discussion forum on the course webpage. This should contain questions or thoughts about the reading, written in a conversational style. You may either “post a new thread” (i.e. original response to the reading) or respond to a classmate’s posting. For reference, you may check the panfora page for this course from last year, available through the website.

2) Two 4-5 pp. papers (25 each%)
Paper topics are available on the web and it will help to glance at them early. Your papers, ideally, will grow out of your weekly responses to the reading, either in section or on the web discussion forum. You are encouraged to come speak about your ideas, during office hours or by appointment, at any point throughout the quarter!

3) Final In-Class Examination
The exam will consist of identification questions and more general essay responses to the major themes from the course. You will be given a number of passages and asked to identify the author and title of the literary work, and to comment concisely on their relation to it—as well as to the eighteenth-century discourses of sense, sensibility, and/or madness. The second section will ask you to think synthetically about the reading and larger concepts of the course, showing your familiarity with the material through specific examples, within a coherently argued exam-essay.