ENGL3951: Romanticism and Repetition

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• To explore various approaches to understanding literary repetitionas poetic or narrative feature; as reading practice; as technological reproduction of the text, etc.
• To analyse literary texts use of repetition in relation to theoretical texts and their perspectives on the significance of repetition.
• To understand both why the Romantic period might serve as a key historical focus for understanding the literary significance of repetition of various kinds and to consider how its poetics and politics reverberate in other historical moments, including our own.

• Imaginative writing in various forms and genres, including sonnets, ballads, novels, closet drama and stage drama, and critical essays.
• Authors may include Jane Austen, Anna Barbauld, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Dickens, Olaudah Equiano, John Keats, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Edgar Allan Poe, Wallace Stevens, Tom Stoppard, and Walt Whitman.
• Theories of repetition by William Hazlitt, Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Peter Brooks, Cathy Caruth, and Sianne Ngai.
• The cultural, psychological, political, social, and affective implications of various kinds of literary repetition, and the history of how a Romantic-period concept of repetition helped inform the very distinction between literature and other kinds of writing as that distinction was being created at the outset of the nineteenth century.

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• Students will be practised in the close reading of poetic and narrative devices of repetition in literary texts, gaining insight by explaining the significance of specific repeated features to how the text as a whole operates.
• Students will gain an understanding of a range of ways of analysing and theorising poetic and narrative patterns of repetition, literary reproduction, and the practice of repeat reading, drawing on the insights of various methods/theories of reading: deconstructive reading (Fried), psychoanalytic criticism (Caruth), narratology (Brooks), historical theory/media studies (Benjamin), and cultural theory (Tang).

Subject-specific Skills:

• Students studying this module will develop:
• critical skills in the close reading and analysis of texts
• an ability to demonstrate knowledge of a range of texts and critical approaches
• informed awareness of formal and aesthetic dimensions of literature and ability to offer cogent analysis of their workings in specific texts
• sensitivity to generic conventions and to the shaping effects on communication of historical circumstances, and to the affective power of language
• an ability to articulate and substantiate an imaginative response to literature
• an ability to articulate knowledge and understanding of concepts and theories relating to literary studies
• skills of effective communication and argument
• awareness of conventions of scholarly presentation, and bibliographic skills including accurate citation of sources and consistent use of scholarly conventions of presentation
• command of a broad range of vocabulary and an appropriate critical terminology
• awareness of literature as a medium through which values are affirmed and debated

Key Skills:

• Students studying this module will develop:
• a capacity to analyse critically
• an ability to acquire complex information of diverse kinds in a structured and systematic way involving the use of distinctive interpretative skills derived from the subject
• competence in the planning and execution of essays
• a capacity for independent thought and judgement, and ability to assess the critical ideas of others
• skills in critical reasoning
• an ability to handle information and argument in a critical manner
• information-technology skills such as word-processing and electronic data access information
• organisation and time-management skills

• Seminars: encourage peer-group discussion, enable students to develop critical skills in the close reading and analysis of texts, and skills of effective communication and presentation; promote awareness of diversity of interpretation and methodology
• Consultation session: encourages students to reflect critically and independently on their work
• Independent but directed reading in preparation for seminars provides opportunity for students to enrich subject-specific knowledge and enhances their ability to develop appropriate subject-specific skills.
• Typically, directed learning may include assigning student(s) an issue, theme or topic that can be independently or collectively explored within a framework and/or with additional materials provided by the tutor. This may function as preparatory work for presenting their ideas or findings (sometimes electronically) to their peers and tutor in the context of a seminar.
• Coursework: tests the student's ability to argue, respond and interpret, and to demonstrate subject-specific knowledge and skills such as appreciation of the power of imagination in literary creation and the close reading and analysis of texts; they also test the ability to present word-processed work, observing scholarly conventions. In individual Special Topics, the essay may, where appropriate to the subject, take an alternative form, such as 'creative criticism'.
• Feedback: The written feedback that is provided after the first assessed essay allows students to reflect on examiners' comments, giving students the opportunity to improve their work for the second essay.

Before Assessment 1, students have an individual 15-minute consultation session in which they are entitled to show their seminar leader a sheet of points relevant to the assessment and to receive oral comment on these points. Students may also if they wish, discuss their ideas for Assessment 2 at this meeting.

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