AJ15070 Pragmatism and Environment in American Poetry

Faculty of Arts
Autumn 2011
Extent and Intensity
0/20/0. 2 credit(s) (plus 2 credits for an exam). Recommended Type of Completion: zk (examination). Other types of completion: z (credit).
Teacher(s)
Mgr. et Mgr. Kateřina Prajznerová, M.A., Ph.D. (lecturer)
Randall Keith Roorda (lecturer)
Guaranteed by
Jeffrey Alan Vanderziel, B.A.
Department of English and American Studies – Faculty of Arts
Contact Person: Tomáš Hanzálek
Prerequisites (in Czech)
( AJ09999 Qualifying Examination || AJ01002 Practical English II ) && AJ04003 Intro. to Literary Studies II
Course Enrolment Limitations
The course is also offered to the students of the fields other than those the course is directly associated with.
The capacity limit for the course is 15 student(s).
Current registration and enrolment status: enrolled: 0/15, only registered: 0/15, only registered with preference (fields directly associated with the programme): 0/15
fields of study / plans the course is directly associated with
there are 7 fields of study the course is directly associated with, display
Course objectives
Description: In the Course Overview I posted earlier, this course is described in this way: In this course we’ll engage with three major American poets—Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams—from perspectives drawn from American pragmatism, and vice versa. We’ll read essays by the two most eminent figures in early pragmatism, William James and John Dewey (and by a third writer of pragmatist temper, my hero Kenneth Burke), whose period of activity (late nineteenth to mid twentieth century) matches that of our three poets. Since pragmatism, according to James, can be thought of as “a new name for an old thing,” we will dwell, too, on an important old thing that pragmatism renames: the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a wellspring for these writers, indispensible to understanding main currents in American thought and expression. Among these currents are relations of natural environment to individual and national identity—a key thread in the weave of our proceedings.
Please consider that overview—including the schedule of readings for morning class sessions—a part of this syllabus.
Please note that this is an intensive course and that classes will be held the week before the semester begins, Monday Sept. 19th - Friday Sept. 23rd, 2011, in room G31.
The aims of the course include to become familiar with the tradition of pragmatism in American literature; to read critically; to analyze primary as well as secondary texts both orally and in writing.
Syllabus
  • Pragmatism and Environment in American Poetry
  • Randall Roorda
  • Masaryk University
  • September 2011
  • Course Overview (and Guide for Advance Reading)
  • In this course we’ll engage with three major American poets—Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams—from perspectives drawn from American pragmatism, and vice versa. We’ll read essays by the two most eminent figures in early pragmatism, William James and John Dewey (and by a third writer of pragmatist temper, my hero Kenneth Burke), whose period of activity (late nineteenth to mid twentieth century) matches that of our three poets. Since pragmatism, according to James, can be thought of as “a new name for an old thing,” we will dwell, too, on an important old thing that pragmatism renames: the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a wellspring for these writers, indispensible to understanding main currents in American thought and expression. Among these currents are relations of natural environment to individual and national identity—a key thread in the weave of our proceedings.
  • In this age of information, it’s easy to find out fast what pragmatism means and does: a split-second internet search will turn up more than you want to know. You can conduct such a search to get oriented, if you like. You’ll learn that pragmatism is a movement in philosophy but also a turn against philosophy; that it suggests a methodology of sorts but also a spirit, temper or attitude; that its historical heyday was followed by a lull, then a redoubling of interest in recent decades; that it resists definition partly because it concerns vagaries of definition, and so on. In lieu of any one definition (including the one in my initial course description: “an American vein of philosophy and literary expression that stresses human continuity with the natural environment, interest in the dynamism of language, and skepticism over the ability of language to effect connection with nature in any but provisional ways”) and in advance of our discussions, I offer the following list of thematic strands and generative questions to help characterize pragmatism and guide our reading. I call these “generative” because they are meant to help us generate observations, comparisons, patterns and implications in our encounters with these texts, prose and poetry alike. In true pragmatist fashion, they are meant for use.
  • • The character of truth (and order and meaning) not as static and preexisting but as dynamic and processual, the upshot of experience. How are states of transition and development stressed over conclusions, experience over doctrine, in establishing truth?
  • • An orientation toward outcomes, prospects, action and futurity rather than origins, retrospection, or purported first principles. What seems essentially forward-looking, in content and temperament?
  • • The status of belief—especially religious belief—in relation to methods and findings of science—especially post-Darwinian evolutionary science. How are science and religion regarded and (if possible) reconciled?
  • • The valence of tradition, the presence and sway of the past. How are history, myth, ritual, custom, precedents and preconceptions of all sorts represented and treated? Conversely, what stances toward modernity (technological, ideological, artistic and otherwise) are represented?
  • • As noted, the nature of nature, the import of environment, growth, landscape, place. How are these manifest, especially biological and geological processes? How are conventions of nature feeling and pastoral modes of expression advanced, revised or subverted?
  • • American national identity, what it consists of, how it’s founded, formulated, enacted and revised. How are these writers peculiarly American, by design or implication?
  • • Relations of aesthetic and philosophical to social, ethical, and political concerns, especially as concerns democracy and social class. How are relations of low and high, of body politic and literate elite, dramatized in these texts? What are the poet’s offices in a social order supposed to be?
  • • Language itself, the issue of imagination, understood and deployed as symbolic action. How do words, sentences, figures and tropes unfold, with what suggestions, interconnections, and effects? Whose language is this, anyway? How is it, and why must it be, continually remade?
  • These themes and questions, I said, are meant for use: I mean for you to use them to help me put together and conduct this class. I ask that as you work through the readings I’ve sent in advance of our class sessions, you bear these questions in mind, be on the lookout, bring them to bear on your reading, in these ways:
  • • In essays by Emerson, James, and Dewey (and by Kenneth Burke), you can work backward, so to speak: look for key statements, arguments, and expressions that exemplify and enact these themes, that might lead someone like me to generalize like this in the first place. Mark your texts and make notes so you can retrieve what you find.
  • • You will have noticed that these themes and questions, though listed as separate, in fact interrelate in all sorts of ways, with views of science and spirit impinging on feelings toward nature, emphasis on present action affecting attitudes toward tradition, etc. Look for passages that enact such interrelations, and look for ways to compare passages in ways that let us see these relations circulate and develop, both within and across writers. Mark texts, take notes.
  • • Reading our poets with these questions before you, look for particular patterns and grounds for comparison. Specifically: look for pairs and clusters of poems that you think would be interesting to read together, to trace themes, discern patterns, pick up on particular terms, concerns, forms and images that recur between them. Clusters can be found within single poets (comparing several poems of Frost, say, for elements of pastoral in relation to class) or across poets (bringing together poems by two or three poets that express, for example, some posture toward organized religion).
  • The groupings you come up with will not remain with you alone: I will ask you, at the first class session, to turn in proposals for thematic clusters of poems, addressing themes and questions above as well as you can in advance of our class sessions. I’ll ask that you produce several clusters, including poems by all three poets, with brief statements explaining your rationales for your groupings, what you notice and would like us to discuss. Though I will have plotted out our readings for all our morning sessions (mainly essays) and for the first of our afternoon sessions (mainly poems), I will draw on the clusters you propose to plan our afternoon sessions. I’ve provided more poems for us to read than we can possibly cover in class, so I’m eliciting your input in winnowing and organizing what’s before us. It seems fitting that, in a course on writers devoted to experience and participatory action, you be involved in shaping our class proceedings.
  • Here is a tentative schedule of readings for our morning sessions (with afternoons given to poems in clusters):
  • Monday: James, “What Pragmatism Means”; Dewey, “Education as Growth“; Emerson, “The American Scholar”
  • Tuesday: Emerson, “Self-Reliance”; James, “The Will to Believe”; Dewey, “The Influence of Darwinism”; Burke, “The Range of Piety”
  • Wednesday: Emerson, “Circles,” “Experience,”; James, “The Continuity of Experience”
  • Thursday: Emerson, “The Poet”; Poirier, “The Reinstatement of the Vague”; Cavell, “An Emerson Mood”
  • Friday: Dewey, “Creative Democracy”: Burke, “On Human Behavior Considered Dramatistically
  • As for assignments and requirements: besides the one I’ve just given (proposed clusters of poems for comparison, with rationales), I’ll draw these up before long. They will include some form of class prep for daily sessions (closely related to note-taking on advance reading I’ve asked you to do already) and some instrument for making something of what you’ve learned at the end of the course—something more open-ended, individualized and synthetic than an exam yet less formal than a paper.
  • One last note and invitation for advance reading. As a native speaker and deft reader of American English, I take it as my special charge to act as a resource for you, to help walk you through verbal intricacies and social contexts in a foreign tongue. But since this task is endless, and since as a teacher I’m less a lecturer than a ringleader, I am counting on you to help direct me. I need you to make note of what you’d like me to help with—terms, expressions, wordplay, references and allusions, winks and nudges, anything that piques or confuses you, that makes you feel there’s something you’re missing, some key or coloration or inside scoop. Please mark and log such spots when you encounter them, to take them up with me individually or address them as issues to the class. I won’t know what you need unless you tell me.
Literature
    required literature
  • Emerson, “The American Scholar”
  • Robert Frost, selected poems
  • Dewey, “Education as Growth“
  • Burke, “On Human Behavior Considered Dramatistically
  • Emerson, “Circles,”
  • Emerson, “The Poet”
  • Burke, “The Range of Piety”
  • Cavell, “An Emerson Mood”
  • Poirier, “The Reinstatement of the Vague”
  • Dewey, “Creative Democracy”
  • Emerson, “Experience,”
  • Wallace Stevens, selected poems
  • James, “The Will to Believe”
  • William Carlos Williams, selected poems
    not specified
  • James, “What Pragmatism Means”
  • James, “The Continuity of Experience”
  • Emerson, “Self-Reliance”
  • Dewey, “The Influence of Darwinism”
Teaching methods
Short presentations, group-work, class discussion, written assignments.
Assessment methods
Requirements and Grading:
Poem clusters with written rationales—the first-day assignment sent in advance of class sessions. I’ll collect these at the conclusion of the first day, second class session. Worth 20% of the course grade.
Daily reading responses for prose works (four of these, due at morning sessions, Tuesday through Friday), a paragraph or so for each essay or an omnibus entry of two or more paragraphs, including some mix of these elements:
• Observations on how you see course themes borne out or put into play;
• Questions concerning “live” issues that arise for you as you read;
• Instances of memorable expression: passages, assertions, turns of phrase that provoke you;
• Points of comparison to particular poems and/or other essays before us;
• Affective, experiential response: how this writing makes you feel, what it reminds you of, what associations it triggers or experiences it evokes. This is not a checklist for response, rather a set of cues; not all these elements need to be addressed, nor addressed in this order. These responses will help set agendas and terms for class sessions, so skip vapid summary and focus on elements you might like to see brought up in class. I’d prefer that these be typed. If you must handwrite, do so super-legibly in ink, please. I’ll give a composite grade for your whole set of responses, worth 40% of the course grade.
Annotations on poems for afternoon sessions. This just means you need to mark up and scribble in the margins of poems we’ll discuss in afternoon sessions. I mean to spot-check and I reserve the option of collecting your annotated copies of poems, starting on the second class day. This annotating is no big deal—just a way of putting in writing my expectation that you come to class ready to work on these texts. My take on your annotations plus my impression of your contribution to class sessions is, together, worth 10% of the course grade (an easy A for 10%, in most cases.)
A short essay developing some pattern of understanding and engagement with our readings, especially the poetry, over the (brief) course of the course. By “short” I mean no more than both sides (single-spaced) of a single sheet of paper. I’ll take time in class to suggest what such an essay might include, how it might proceed; in any case, it need not be formal and involves no outside research, but it should be cogent, thoughtful, and specific. You can turn this in at the last class session or take the weekend to work on it, turning it in by late afternoon (16:00) on Monday 26/9. Worth 30%.
Attendance
Though just five days long, this course has ten class sessions, and it’s not a lecture course, rather one depending on your active participation. The course consists of our time together in class. To pass it, you can be absent no more than one class session—not day, rather session. If there’s a day you know you’ll have to miss, you shouldn’t take the course.
Language of instruction
English
Further comments (probably available only in Czech)
Study Materials
The course is taught: in blocks.
Note related to how often the course is taught: Rozvrh je k dispozici na http://www.phil.muni.cz/wkaa/home/Documents/Roorda.doc.
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