ENG 425G-001, F 2001

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Syllabus

Schedule	Course Policies
Course Requirements	Course Objectives

ENG 465-001, Sp 2003	David Lee Miller
TR 12:30-1:45	Hours W 10-12, R 2-3
CB 233	1265 POT, 7-6965

The Poetry of Edmund Spenser

Texts:

Hamilton, A.C. Spenser: The Faerie Queene

McCabe, Richard, Spenser: The Shorter Poems

[If McCabe is unavailable, then the Yale edition, edited by Oram, may be substituted]

Requirements:

Requirements for this class start with regular attendance and participation, which account for 10% of the final grade (see Course Policies). Other assignments and their percentage values are as follows:

three journal installments 10% each, total 30%

short essay 20%

commentary 30%

class presentation 10%

participation 10%

Schedule:

All assignments (papers, tests, reading and viewing assignments) are due on the day for which they are listed.

Week	Day	scheduled class activity	readings or assignments due on this day
	R 1/16	Introductions--to each other and to the course
1	T 1/21	The New Poet	"Spenser" (xerox) *The Shepheardes Calender*
	R 1/23	*What is E.K. up to?*	EK's glosses, "Glossing" article (xerox)
2	T 1/28	*How do we read TSC, and what do we need to know?*	De Selincourt, Osgood & Lotspeich, Cain, McCabe, Oram
	R 1/30	What is commentary?	Ford, "Epic and the Earliest Greek Allegorists" (reserve) Hamilton, "On Annotating Spenser's Faerie Queene" (reserve)
3	T 2/4	Field trip to Special Collections	First journal installment due
	R 2/6	Beginning The Faerie Queene	FQ I.i-iii
4	T 2/11	reading lessons in the poem	Letter to Raleigh, FQ I.proem
	R 2/13		FQ I.iv-vi
5	T 2/18		FQ I.vii-ix
	R 2/20		FQ I.x-xii
6	T 2/25		FQ II.i-iii
	R 2/27
7	T 3/4
	R 3/6		FQ II.iv-vi
8	T 3/11		FQ II.vii-ix Second journal installment due
	R 3/13		FQ II x-xii First Essay Due
	*3/14 -3/23*	SPRING BREAK
9	T 3/25	Settle commentary assignments	FQ III.i-iii
	R 3/27		FQ III.iv-vi
10	T 4/1		FQ III.vii-ix
	R 4/3	Tracing Wounds	FQ III.x-xii
11	T 4/8		Proem to Book III + Garden of Adonis + 1596 conclusion + IV.i
	R 4/10		Commentary workshop. (location to be announced)
12	T 4/15	Class presentation (Garden of Adonis)	III.vi
	R 4/17	Class presentation (Mammon's Cave)	II.vii
13	T 4/22	Class presentations (Orgoglio's Castle) (Garden of Adonis II)	I.vii - I.viii III.vi.32-33
	R 4/24	Class presentations (Arthur and Maleger) (The Hyena) (Garden of Adonis III)	II. xi III.vii.22-28 III.vi FINAL JOURNAL INSTALLMENT DUE
14	T 4/29		Mutability Cantos
	R 5/1	Course evaluations	COMMENTARIES DUE

Schedule	Course Policies
Course Requirements	Course Objectives

COURSE POLICIES

Policies below are based on Student Rights and Responsibilities, available as a handbook from the Dean of Students. Its contents may also be viewed online at the following address: http://www.uky.edu/StudentAffairs/Code/part2.html.

Attendance: Attendance is required in this course. You are permitted three absences without penalty. These need not meet the formal definition of "excused absences" (SRR V-5.2.4.2). But please note that after three absences, each unexcused absence will carry a penalty of 0.2 points (on a 4.0 scale) to be deducted from the final course average. (For example, three unexcused absences, after your first three, the will lower a course average of 3.1 to 2.5, that is, from a B to a C.) Please also note that your three permitted absences are the first three; you don't get to exempt "excused" absences from the total so as to "save up" your three free absences for unexcused absences later in the semester.

No student who misses more than six classes (20% of the contact hours for the course) for any reason will receive a passing grade. (This policy is based on Student Rights and Responsibilities V-5.2.4.2.) If the absences are excused, you may take a "W" for the course; if not, you will receive a failing grade.

Cheating and plagiarism: For definitions of these terms, see Section VI-6.3.0 of Student Rights and Responsibilities. Any student who cheats, plagiarizes, or in any other way falsifies work for this course will receive a failing grade and will be referred to the appropriate academic dean for disciplinary action. Please note that "E" grades given for academic misconduct may not be removed by retaking the course.

Lateness: Class meetings are like an appointment. We both agree to show up on time. Latecomers will be subjected to withering sarcasm. Note: If you do come in late, it is your responsibility to be sure I correct the roll. Students who forget this sometimes find their grades lowered because I have recorded them absent on days when they arrived after roll had been taken.

Extensions: If you know an assignment will be slightly late and there's a good reason for it, seek an extension in advance. As long as you plan ahead, I will negotiate reasonable extensions. What I won't do is give extensions on (or after) the day the assignment is due. Unexcused lateness for graded assignments will carry a penalty of 0.1 points per day, weekends, holidays, and naptimes included, to be deducted from the final grade for the assignment.

Please keep this syllabus with your course materials and bring it to class regularly.

Schedule	Course Policies
Course Requirements	Course Objectives

Course Requirements

As your syllabus says, the requirements for this class start with regular attendance and participation, which account for 10% of the final grade (see Course Policies). And as I added in class, participation in the class listserv will count as a form of participation. Other assignments and their percentage values are given on the syllabus as follows:

three journal installments 10% each, total 30%

short essay 20%

commentary 30%

class presentation 10%

1. Journal installments: due Tuesday February 4, Tuesday March 11, and Thursday April 17.

· Journal installments should be typed, for two reasons: first, they're a lot easier to read that way, and second, if you keep an electronic journal you can submit a printout to me and keep working on the journal while I'm reading it. A lovingly inscribed bound volume is aesthetically more pleasing, but you won't be able to write in it while I'm reading it.

· In your journal, please concentrate on the editorial commentary and other "apparatus" in various editions of Spenser's poems. You may want to write about what the commentary contains (is it interesting? Useful?) or doesn't (did you look for something that wasn't there?) and about how it affects your reading (when do you prefer to ignore it?).

· From time to time you will be assigned specific journal exercises. These will involve taking notes in response to specific questions as preparation for class discussion; comparing commentaries in different editions; and exploring the effect that information provided in commentaries may have on your understanding of the poem.

There is no set minimum or maximum length for your journal entries. It will be obvious to me whether your journal represents a serious, sustained effort. That's what matters, and I won't try to measure it simply by numbers of pages. It's obvious that a skimpy journal is unlikely to make a strong impression, but neither is a copious journal that's disorganized, hard to read (because carelessly written), or not responsive to the bulleted instructions above. Any questions?

2. Short Essay: due Thursday March 13.

5-7 pages, double-spaced, with margins of 1 inch. Provide a title but please don't use a cover sheet or any sort of folder. References should be given in MLA format, which calls for parenthetical references keyed to a Works Cited list, reserving endnotes for comments that involve more than just a page reference.

This essay will build on the work you have done in your journal. In fact, it will develop out of a specific journal exercise. In both assignments you will work with one sort of information provided by editorial commentaries, which identify allusions to, borrowings from, or transformations of other texts. Your job will be to explore how your understanding of Spenser's poem is affected by an awareness of its engagement with one or more prior texts--Virgil's Aeneid, perhaps, or Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. You will be seeking to interpret the poem's meaning, as one normally does in writing a critical analysis; but your interpretation will focus specifically on the way this meaning emerges out of the poem's relation to the literary tradition.

3. Commentary: due Tuesday, April 29.

For this assignment you will select a specific passage or episode from the first three books of Spenser's Faerie Queene and provide an editorial commentary on it, accompanied by an "editor's introduction" to the canto. You may create different versions of this commentary if you wish: one intended for a classroom text, one for a scholarly edition, and/or one for a digital archive where commentary can be linked to the poem as hypertext. Your introduction should be designed to prepare a first-time reader to approach the text with as much comprehension and appreciation as possible.

I expect that most of you will collaborate on single "cantos" of the poem in teams of 3-4. In such instances, the final version of your commentary + introduction should be accompanied by a statement describing each team member's contribution.

4. Class Presentation: to be scheduled during the last half of April.

The class presentation will be a stage in your work on the commentary. Your assignment is, essentially, to organize and lead class discussion for one day on the canto or passage that you are working on. You may incorporate brief "presentations" of a more formal nature into the class if you wish, but however you proceed, the focus of the class should be on the variety of materials that a commentary may include and on the issues and information an introduction might need to cover.

Take advantage of this opportunity. In effect, you're being given a full class period in which to run a workshop on your course project. If you approach this assignment with imagination and careful preparation, it should be extremely valuable in helping you shape your final piece of work for the class.

Schedule	Course Policies
Course Requirements	Course Objectives

About this Class

The course has three objectives. Students who complete the assigned work should 1) be able to read the poetry of Edmund Spenser with pleasure and understanding, 2) understand what it means to think of literary history as something created by poets in the process of reading and rewriting their predecessors, and 3) develop a clear sense of editorial commentary as a form of scholarly research.

Our approach to Spenser's poetry in this course follows the recommendation of a 1998 report by the Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University.⁽¹⁾

^{Under the heading "Ten Ways to Change Undergraduate Education," the report lists
as its top recommendation "Make Research-Based Learning the Standard." In explaining
this ideal, the Commission asks that scholar-teachers}

^{treat the sites of their research as seminar
rooms in which not only graduate students but undergraduates observe and participate
in the process of both discovery and communication of knowledge. Those with knowledge
and skills, regardless of their academic level, would practice those skills in
the research enterprise and help to develop the proficiency of others. Even though
few researchers ever escape the human temptation to compete for rewards, this
model is collaborative, not competitive. It assumes that everybody--undergraduate,
graduate student, and faculty member alike--is both a teacher and a researcher,
that the educational-research process is one of discovery, not transmission, and
that communication is an integral part of the shared enterprise.}

^{The research project in which we will all participate
is the preparation of a new scholarly edition, The Collected Works of Edmund
Spenser, under contract with Oxford University Press. The Spenser Project
is a long-term, collaborative research enterprise projected to take twelve years
and expected to occupy the energies of many scholars and students on many campuses.
It will produce a three-volume library edition of the poet's works, a sophisticated
electronic archive that should serve as the database for much future research,
and a one-volume classroom edition of the poet's works.}

^{One of this project's many aspects is the creation
of editorial commentary to accompany the text in all three forms--the scholarly
and classroom versions of the edition as well as the digital archive. Among the
four general editors of the edition, I am responsible for supervising the preparation
of commentaries. In this class, we will look briefly at the history of commentary
on poetic texts, and we will compare various editions of Spenser, examining the
editorial apparatus in order to reflect on some very basic questions: What is
commentary, and what is it for? What is its relation to the "primary"
text? What should it include?}

^{All your assignments for this class--the journal
installments, the presentations, and the major assignment--are keyed to the exploration
of these questions. In the process of answering them, we should achieve the third
of the objectives mentioned above, to "develop a clear sense of editorial commentary
as a form of scholarly research." But how does this objective relate to the first
two?}

^{Course objectives 2 and 3 are joined by an assumption:
that one of the main jobs a commentary needs to do is point readers toward prior
texts that the poet is "citing" and transforming in some way. In order to construct
your own commentaries on even a single canto of Spenser's major poem, you will
find it necessary to research many aspects of literary and intellectual history,
following the poet's references to the Bible, classical epic and lyric, medieval
poetry, and classical as well as medieval philosophy, to mention only a few examples.
In class discussion, in your journals, and in your first essay for the class,
you will also seek to understand how the poet is engaging such prior
texts, and how these engagements are a key to reading the text before us. That
brings us back to the first objective, for I also assume that this way of learning
to read Spenser will enhance your understanding and appreciation of his poetry.
Ideally, it will also change the way you read other texts as well, by giving you
a heightened awareness of literary history as a dimension of their meaning.}

^{Your final product for the class, your commentaries,
will not only be submitted in hard copy. As research, they will be electronically
published on the website for this class and will be available as an internet resource
for the study of Spenser.}

^{1. 1 REINVENTING UNDERGRADUATE
EDUCATION: A Blueprint for America's Research Universities (1998). May be viewed
online at http://naples.cc.sunysb.edu/Pres/boyer.nsf/}

Schedule	Course Policies
Course Requirements	Course Objectives