Rob Hume                                                                                                                                                                      Fall 2007

Office: 13B Burrowes                                                                                                                                                         Mondays 6:30-9:30

Office hours:

Monday 8-9

Wednesday 8-9, 10-11:30, 1-2

        and by appointment

Office phone: 3-2344

Home phone: 814-355-4092

    (before 10 p.m. please)

E-mail: Rob-Hume@psu.edu

Website: www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/h/b/hb1

This will be a decidedly unconventional seminar, so please read the syllabus carefully and make sure you have taken on board what it says.

One of the most vital parts of the course-taking phases of graduate study is finding a critical methodology that you believe in and can make work for you. Trendy notions come and go. In the 1970s structuralism was all the rage; ten years later it was as dead as the dodo, and those who had committed to it found themselves in dire straits if they were not able and willing to remarry, as it were. New Criticism now seems a historical oddity. Semiotics enjoyed only a very short popularity. The New Historicism turned out to be (a) a gross misnomer and (b) a largely superficial and fallacious enterprise. "Reader Response criticism" flared and fizzled. Deconstruction had a much longer run, and in my view remains a very useful tool, but is long past the point of awing and intimidating others in the field. The Deleuze and Guattari mania seems pretty much to have run its course.

What is the point of the scholarship or criticism you do? Why does it matter? Will you believe in what you have published when you are 40? 60? Just what are you trying to accomplish (beyond getting a job and getting tenure)? At the height of the deconstructionist craze the "Old Historicism" was derided as cheap positivism and mere drudgery, but though never trendy, it has continued to be widely practiced (both badly and well) for the past hundred years and shows no sign of disappearing. The reasons are obvious. Literature is written at a particular time and in a particular place by particular people for fairly specific audiences. If we want to know why a work we are trying to interpret was written as it was, to whom it was addressed, and how it was received by a variety of audiences (both at the time of origin and later), then we must appeal to contextual knowledge of various kinds.

I would describe much of my own work as "contextual historicism," and you are welcome to look at those exemplars of this approach to the historical study of literature (publication list available on my website: http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/h/b/hb1/ [the last element is h-b-arabic one]). The essentials of much of my own method are to be found in my Reconstructing Contexts: The Aims and Principles of Archaeo-Historicism (Oxford University Press, 1999)—a book I do not intend to cover in this seminar.

I conceive the point of this seminar as being a joint group investigation of the underpinnings, assumptions, and possibilities of contextual historicism as a critical methodology. Since there are literally thousands of books and articles that could be relevant to the enterprise (both theoretical and period/country specific) the common reading for seminar sessions must be both radically selective and somewhat arbitrary. You are by no means limited to the authors, books, and approaches covered in class.

Here are the basic operating principles and ground rules for this course.

(1) I will assign fairly brief readings for each week’s session. These will mostly be articles or extracts from books made available for you to photocopy for yourselves. I will put the readings on file in the Graduate Office in Burrowes for you to photocopy for yourselves. Some of the articles can be obtained electronically from J-Stor and other such sources. If you already own one of the relevant books (many of which are available quite cheaply on ABE-books) then use your own copy.

(2) I expect from each of you a short response to the week’s reading (1 page should be plenty; two pages maximum please). You are free to praise, criticize, or denounce any piece. Objections are very welcome. In any case, I expect questions about them. We will use these position papers and questions as a basis for discussion each week. Please note a vital point: The position papers/questions are to be sent to me no later than 6 p.m on Sundays. I want time to read and absorb them and to decide how to use them each week. Here is my rationale. I know very well that most graduate students do not in fact seriously "do" the assigned reading in seminars. I could give you a three-hour lecture each week, but this would not really involve you people very significantly. I do not want the kind of yak-bull-session that many seminar teachers encourage. I am sure all of you know how to run your mouths without having read the material. I want informed participation from everyone. I will therefore keep the readings quite short most weeks (some will be easy going, some hard) with the expectation that you will read carefully, think, and give me substantively serious set of brief responses. They will not be graded but they are required and I want them on time. Early Sunday evening I will circulate the responses to all members of the group.

(3) I will supply you with a list of some books and articles which seem to me potentially of interest and relevant to this investigation. I want from each of you two standard-length scholarly book reviews of material not covered in class. These are to be circulated electronically to all members of the seminar. One to be circulated in September, the second in October, please. I will put a sign-up sheet on my office door. You are free to go beyond this somewhat arbitrary list. If you want to review a book not on the list, please check with me to get approval before you spend time on reviewing it. The objects of this exercise are (a) to give you some practice in a standard professional genre and (b) to sharpen your critical faculties in judging published work and (c) to give all members of the seminar exposure to and some familiarity with circa 20 books they will not otherwise have read.

(4) The principal assignment for the course is to write TWO DRAFTS of a serious term paper. The paper should be designed as something that might be suitable for publication with sufficient further work and revision. Many of you will not produce anything with much publication potential, but you should be TRYING to think in terms of projects that could lead to publishable results. Your paper might be of any of the following types. (1) A piece of original theory [hard to do at this point in your career]. (2) A critique of existing historical theory or theorists. (3) A historical analysis of a critical theory movement. (4) An attempt to carry out a piece of contextual historicist analysis of literature in any period of English or American literature. (5) A historicist critique of previous attempts to carry out such contextual analysis and criticism. In other words, my concern is with relevance to methodology, and there is no limitation in subject matter. If you want to write about medieval plays or American transcendental writers, fine. I realize that the two-draft requirement is cruel, unusual, unjust, and unkind. But in real life, scholars do not write publishable stuff in the last two frantic weeks of semester in one try. I want you to write the BEST paper you are capable of writing, properly formatted and fully footnoted, preferably by the meeting of 5 November (or earlier) but definitely by the meeting of 12 November. You will get it back within 48 hours with detailed scribble-up and a typed comment of some length suggesting ways of improving the article. "Draft" does not mean a piece of half-baked crap. "Revision" does not mean merely correcting the typos and sloppy writing I will mark. I will be glad to read additional serious drafts between mid-November and the due date of the final draft, which will be 21 December.

(5) A note about term paper length. I refuse to give you a specified length. Length is not the point. Most journal articles will run 20-25 pages of doublespace typing. Running over 30 pages tends to make pieces hard to peddle. If your paper comes out 12 pages, you have probably not got a large enough topic or have underwritten your results. But some serious enterprises can be written up in relatively few pages. Many years ago one of my graduate teachers responded to the "how long does it have to be?" question by saying "I would rather have four publishable pages than forty pages of padded bilge." Right.

(6) Our last schedule group session will be Monday 3 December. By 6 p.m. on Sunday 2 December you will please circulate to all members of the seminar a cogent, pithy, two-page position paper in which you set forth a methodological position that you would be prepared to adopt and defend in carrying out what you currently think will be your thesis area and specialty. You can adopt or attack any of the critics you have read, whether covered in joint sessions or not. Feel free to go out on limbs and take risks. This is the kind of thinking that needs to contribute to your sense of your professional definition of yourself. What do you want to work on? What kind of work will you do? What justifies it?

(7) I expect all of you to consult with me regularly. You cannot fairly be expected to do the sort of work I want from you without advice. I will hold office hours as scheduled and will attempt to accommodate those with schedule conflicts. I am usually able and willing to see a student any day of the week (Saturday and Sunday included) if he or she is able to get to my house, which is about a mile down Bernel Road (which cuts off from Fox Hill Road on the way to the airport from Toftrees). If you choose to avoid me outside of class that’s fine, but don’t expect a good grade unless you are already a brilliant writer putting stuff in good journals. And even if you are, you might benefit from some consultation and advice.

(8) I have never in my life "graded" a graduate paper. I regard paper grades as stupid, misguided, and pedagogically unsound. At the end of the semester I will write a letter to the Graduate Studies Committee assessing your performance (with a copy to you). The letter will include the following statement of course-grade policy:

What grades mean in English 597B. I had registered students ranging from first-semester MA candidates to Ph.D. candidates working on thesis proposals. I have assigned grades on the following assumptions: "A" means that as best I can judge the student is currently producing work that should result in article publication and a strong and potentially publishable dissertation. "A-’’ means that the student is potentially capable of producing such work, given time and effort. "B+" means that the student is doing solid graduate work at his or her current level but has not yet demonstrated the ability and discipline required for serious publication. "B" means that the student ought to be able to complete the current degree program respectably. A grade of "B-’’ or below indicates grave reservations about the student’s ability to complete his or her current degree program creditably.

(9) Assuming that people have enough cars among them to transport the whole of the crew, we will meet (after the organizational meeting of Monday 27 August) at my house, 2496 Bernel Road, State College. To get to the house drive past Toftrees on Fox Hollow Road, around the bend onto Fox Hill Road toward the airport. When the road curves to the left it becomes Bernel Road. We are the second house on the left, about a mile down the road. You can’t miss it: the house has two large geodesic domes behind it and a mailbox on the street saying "Hume 2496." Park up the driveway in the circle in front of the house.

SCHEDULE

August

27 Orientation

September

3 No class (Labor Day)

10 David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies, xv-xxii, chapters 1, 2, and 6; Conclusion (307-318).

[Please note that I will be out of the country and unavailable 11-16 September.]

17 Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, chapters 4 and 5; Carl G. Hempel, "The Function of General Laws in History," Journal of Philosophy, 39 (1942), 35-48; Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed., Introduction and chapters 3-4-5.

24 R. S. Crane, The Idea of the Humanities and Other Essays Critical and Historical, vol. 2:

"History versus Criticism in the Study of Literature" (3-24); "Criticism as Inquiry; or, The Perils of the ‘High Priori Road’" (25-44); "On Hypotheses in ‘Historical Criticism’: Apropos of Certain Contemporary Medievalists" (236-260). Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, Part 1 (pages 1-22). [For some of my own current views on related matters, see "The Aims and Limits of Historical Scholarship," The Review of English Studies, n.s. 53 (2002), 399-422.]

October

1 J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time, chapter 1 ("Languages and Their Implications: The Transformation of the Study of Political Thought"). Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, volume 1: Regarding Method (Cambridge UP, 2002), chapters 1, 4, and 5. [For commentary on both men’s work, see my "Pocock’s Contextual Historicism," in The Political Imagination in History: Essays Concerning J. G. A. Pocock, ed. D. N. DeLuna (Baltimore: Owlworks, 2006), pp. 27-55.]

8 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, chapter 6; Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, chapters 1 and 16; Jean E. Howard, "The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies," English Literary Renaissance, 16 (1986), 13-43.

One-page Term Paper Proposal Due. Please give me a Title, a focal question, and some sense of the materials to be covered and the objectives of the enterprise.

15 Richard Levin, New Readings vs. Old Plays (U of Chicago Press, 1979), pages 1-28, 146-159, 194-207. Also Levin’s "Feminist Thematics and Shakespearean Tragedy," PMLA, 103 (1988), 125-138 (and a reply signed by a group of feminist critics, "Feminist Criticism," PMLA, 104 (1989), 77-79), and Levin’s "The Poetics and Politics of Bardicide," PMLA, 105 (1990), 491-504. D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, first lecture. [For my take on textual theory issues, see "The Aims and Uses of ‘Textual Studies’," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 99 (2005), 197-230.]

22 J. H. Hexter, The History Primer, chapters 1 and 10. Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism, chapter 1.

29 Clifford Geertz, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," chapter 1 of The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). M. H. Abrams, "Construing and Deconstructing," pp. 297-332 of Doing Things With Texts (1989). John M. Ellis, Against Deconstruction, chapters 1, 6, 7.

November

5 Presentation by Ashley Marshall: The Practice of Satire in England, 1650-1770.

12 René Wellek, "The Fall of Literary History," pages 64-77 of The Attack on Literature and Other Essays. David Perkins, Is Literary History Possible? Chapters 1 and 6. [For my own views on literary history, see "Construction and Legitimation in Literary History," The Review of English Studies, n.s. 56 (2005), 632-661.

19 NO CLASS: THANKSGIVING WEEK

26 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (MIT Press, 1989), pages 1-43, 57-67, 181-195. Alan Downie, "How useful to eighteenth-century English studies is the paradigm of the ‘bourgeois public sphere’? Literature Compass 1 (2003), 1-18 [electronic journal] and "The Myth of the Bourgeois Public Sphere," pp. 58-79 of A Concise Companion to the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, ed. Cynthia Wall (Blackwell, 2005).

December

3 Finale. Discussion of two-page position papers.

10 [spare]

21 FINAL DRAFT OF TERM PAPER DUE