Julie Randall's Class Summary

== Julie Randall British Romantic Literature Dr. Foss Thursday, April 7, 2011

Class Summary ==

Class began with an exciting announcement: Professor Emerson won the Guggenheim award! And to celebrate- a Guggenheim Reward Quiz! After the reward quizzes were passed up, class turned to a discussion of the topic for the day: Science and Nature. The class turned to the summary page for the text, page 105, and reviewed some of the major points of the topic. These included a discussion of science as an objective, culturally, and factually determined discipline in which to read literature. Looking at science and nature and the ways that they were included in British romantic literature, we were then asked to compare science and nature to romantic imagination and irony. After small/large group discussions of the nine poems from Barbauld, Smith, Robinson, Baillie and Austen, we found that Imagination had a greater emphasis in the writing of the British Romantic Time period than Scientific Reason.

Before splitting into small groups for our “BOOM-BOOM-BOOM” rotation, in which each group works on a separate set of poems to analyze for ten minutes before passing the papers in a counter-clockwise direction, the class looked over the biographical information for our new writers of the day, Charlotte Smith, on page 225, and Joanna Baillie, on page 430. Smith was credited with the revival of the sonnet, while Baillie wrote “Introductory Discourse”, which is said to have inspired Wordsworth and Blake. Both poets were incredibly successful female poets who wrote to support themselves and whose works we read for class discussed the power of nature and it’s affect on the Romantic imagination.

After dividing the class into three “small groups”, we were given a set of three poems to review for insight on science and nature, most notably, the relation of Fancy to Reality. The first set of poems my small group received looked at Robinson’s sonnets and Austen’s, “To the Memory of Mrs. Lefroy”. We read the Robinson poems to be dialogues of each other, with the Sonnet VII containing a plea for reason and salvation from passion in order to overcome romantic sentiment. This sonnet played off of Sonnet XI, which held reason in high esteem, while still asking readers to think in terms of imagination. This thought seemed to play off of Wordsworth’s statement that imagination makes poetry- Robinson uses her sonnet to show that reason cannot repress imagination. Jane Austen’s poem seemed to continue this thought process, with more investment in fancy and the imagination, with regards to relations to humanity, than to investments in scientific thought.

In our second round, my small group looked at a set of three sonnets by Charlotte Smith; “To Fancy”, “To Dr. Parry”, and “Reflection on some drawing of plants”. These poems continued the theme of preferring imagination to science and nature; however, Smith’s work seemed to focus more on the connection between science and art than to contrasting the two themes. There was a reoccurring motif of the pencil and the word, “mimic” within each of the sonnets, emphasizing the communication of thoughts from idea into writing. Smith focused on the idea of writing as a medium for an imitation to life, with focus on the death of her daughter. By using the pencil in each of her works, she shows the educational utensil becoming the medium through which imagination is experienced, thereby connecting both science, as an embodiment of education, and fancy.

Our third exchange within the small group activity looked at the role of humans to the relation of science and nature. Barbauld’s poem, “to Mr. S. T. Coleridge” was an appeal to detour from scientific thought to find creativity and imagination within science. Her work showed science as a gateway into the romantic imagination, with emphasis on scientific terms, such as gossamer, transforming to products of the imagination, such as Cicre, the enchantress from the Illiad who turned men into swine (15, 37). Likewise, Smith’s poem, “Written in the church-yard at Middleton in Sussex” takes the natural disorder of the sea to contemplate the romantic imagination of the affects of nature on the human condition. Smith contemplates the power of nature to be greater than mans, by the uprooting of graves and the erasing of traces left by mankind, in favor of a return to the imagination and thoughts of mortality.

Once the class returned to large group, the class briefly discussed the observation of the readings from Romantic science and nature. The appeal to the imagination was discussed to be an appeal to human emotion and feelings, providing an escape from the reality presented by science and nature. However, this was thought to be dangerous, by allowing the poet to become too far away from reality and reason. While reason was thought to be privileged by a societal point of view, in relation to the philosophical effects of the French Revolution, it shadowed the importance and return to the Fancy by romantic authors. The use of nature to provide reason to the imagination, and the importance of sympathy, interpersonal relationships, and connections, were held to be preferred in our selection of readings within the topic of Nature and Science.

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