| About the Instructor | Workload | Participation |
| Course Description | Required Books | Assignments |
| Goals and Outcomes | Attendance | Grading |
ENG180J/280J
Winter 2018
Hybrid Online 3 Credit Course
Fulfills Critical Analysis and Creativity Innovation and Experimentation
In-Person Meetings:
Tuesday, December 12th 2017
5:00-7:00
Mills Hall 318
Introduction
Friday, January 19th 2018
2:00-5:00
Salon and High Tea
Online Section of Course:
Tuesday January 2- Friday January 11
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About the Instructor
Kirsten T. Saxton is an award winning Professor of English and Mills College and scholar of eighteenth-century British literature.
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Course Description
Jane Austen enjoys popularity virtually unmatched among English literary authors; perhaps only Shakespeare can boast a wider readership. Indeed, much like the Bard himself, Austen is widely read by academics as well as by a vast popular audience. At a time when her novels are generating countless fictional and filmic adaptations, Austen is also the subject of exciting revisionist criticism that provides new insights into the author and her work. The time is clearly right to assess the relevance of Austen in her time and our own.
Jane Austen was the preeminent novelist of the British Romantic era, and her cultural capital remains high: her novels have been adapted into highly successful films and hold a steady spot in most US colleges’ core curricula as well as being taken over by zombies and presented by Bollywood. Stanford is currently conducting neurological research based on MRIs to test “your brain on Austen,” and Jane Austen inspired kitsch retains brisk commodity power.
Austen’s work is claimed as simultaneously conservative and radical and is adapted and appropriated for almost every audience, from the BBC to hip hop to queer fan fiction. Her fictions have also sustained their importance as scholarly touchstones for critical inquiry; her work is currently studied by, for example, narrative theorists, feminist theorists, formalists, queer theorists, post-colonial theorists, place theorists, economic critics, and social historians.
What sustains Austen’s fiction’s continued popularity and critical acclaim? And what is it about her plots that sustain adaptations that span all literary genres and most cultures—national and social?
This January intensive course combines robust analysis of the works themselves—the major novels and selections from the juvenilia and unpublished letters—with theoretical and critical consideration of both the nineteenth-century print culture that first enabled publication of Austen’s novels, and the twenty-first century digital world that now facilitates access to her manuscripts and books and the adaptations they inspire.
As we study Austen’s formal innovations in the representation of psychological experience, we will discuss the relationships between style, irony, self-image, shame, embarrassment, social manners and novelistic form. We will also attend to broader theoretical arguments connecting the rise of the novel to the formation of bourgeois subjectivities steeped in capitalism, colonialism, and heteronormativity novelistic fiction simultaneously undermines and re-articulates these subjectivities at the levels of content and form.
In addition to primary textual material and scholarly criticism, we will use digital humanities content to access contextual historical material from the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries on relevant topics.
Mills College has in its collection an important Austen piece and an excellent collection of relevant texts and ephemera; we will have the extraordinary good luck to view and handle Jane Austen’s handwritten family prayer in the Heller Rare Books room at our January meeting. Mills special collection librarian Janice Braun will do a presentation on print culture and the history of the book in Austen’s era.
Requirements for this course include a great deal of old-fashioned close reading as well as modern internet grazing and digital humanities work.
The class is ideally poised for hybrid learning: you will do much reading, commenting, viewing, and responding through interactive and tested digital platforms. We will come together to engage the material culture of Austen–tea, scones, and rare books as well as to present our final projects in a salon.
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Course Goals and Outcomes
At the end of this course, students will gain the following understandings:
- Familiarity with major themes in Austen’s oeuvre
- Familiarity with characteristics of Austen’s style
- Familiarity with some of the major socio-historical-cultural contexts that frame Austen’s novels
- Familiarity with the overarching critical reception of the six major novels
- Familiarity with characterizations, motifs, and narrative practices of three of Austen’s major novels
At the end of this course, students will have practiced the following skills:
- The ability to speak and write about Austen’s cultural moment
- The ability to engage in lively discussion of Austen’s literary texts and their contexts
- The ability to write literary close readings of Austen’s fiction
- The ability to identify and apply cultural and historical knowledge to a literary text
- Design and delivery of directed analysis, summary, presentations, discussion questions
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Workload
The overall workload is the same as for the regular semester-length course, but obviously there are not many days between classes in which to complete readings and assignments. You need to read the assigned Austen novels before the first class. This is a very intensive schedule! Thank goodness it’s Austen!
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Required Books
Please order Norton Critical Editions:
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Attendance
This class relies heavily on reading and engaging with one another’s work online by set deadlines. One cannot pass the class if one falls behind. This class also requires 2 in person meetings. You need to attend both of these meetings in person meetings to pass the class.
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Participation
This class will sink or swim depending on what we bring to it. Let’s bring our best selves: ready to share our opinions and insights about the books, films, and history, prepared with our assignments, collegial and respectful and generous to everyone in the virtual or physical room, able to disagree thoughtfully, mindful of our differences, and ready and willing to learn from one another.
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Assignments
All assignments must be submitted using Google Drive. There are specific folders already set up for each assignment. Please upload your assignments to the appropriate folders so that your peers can find them.
Unless the syllabus states otherwise, written assignments should be typed in 12 pt. Times New Roman Font (or something equally boring and easy to read) and double-spaced. Citation and format should follow MLA 8th edition standards (you may look this all up on Purdue’s OWL page).
You are required to complete the following assignments:
- ONE Cultural Presentation*
- ONE Keyword Report*
- ONE Criticism Presentation*
- Reading Responses
- Final Project
*You must choose a different book for each of these assignments.
Here are the sign up sheets
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Cultural Presentation
Each student will sign up for one of the cultural presentation topics. Using Thinglink, you will upload an image that summarizes your cultural topic and annotate it using the most creative and interactive facts you can imagine. Your goal is to introduce us to the topic at hand and connect the topic to our novel for that day.
To join our ThingLink Austen group, use the code: NPWG4A
Instructions for joining ThingLink can be found on the ThinkLink Registration page.
And for information regarding creating a ThingLink see: https://support.thinglink.com/articles/image-creation
Your presentation must be informative and interesting and relevant. You may annotate your image using pictures, songs, text boxes, Buzzfeed quizzes, links to other pages, etc. Make us participate and engage us — the more creative the better!
The presentation must:
- Define the cultural phenomenon both literally/generally (dictionary definition, etc.) and within its historical context. You will need to think about if the term/phenomenon has critical or theoretical relevance/implications.
- Make it come alive to us — immerse us in the concept and why it matters
- Make some links to the text — specifically — how might the novel or Austen studies in general be illuminated by your report?
Topics might include, for example:
- Fashion/Clothing
- Music
- Manners
- Conduct books
- Games and Puzzles
- Hair and make-up
- Motherhood
- Soldiers, the Military, Militia
- The Ball
- London
- Bath
- Sewage/Garbage/Waste
- Medical Care
- Women’s education
- Servants
- Landscaping
- Class divisions: gentry/aristocracy/laborers/military and so forth
- Rise of Consumer Culture
- Entail/inheritance/Money/Property
- Marriage
- Transportation/Carriages/Horses
- Imperialism/Empire
- Abolition movements and Slavery
- Architecture and Social Space
- Food
- Tea
- The Peerage
- You may suggest any additional topic for my approval
You are responsible for viewing and responding to each of your peers’ presentations by 11:59 PM the day after the presentation is due. A Google Doc will be available for each Cultural Presentation so so you can offer feedback.
If you need help with Thinglink, you can ask questions here or email me for help.
Example:
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Keyword Report
Keyword reports are just that: a report on a word you think is “key” to understanding the content, form, structure, rhetoric, characters or extra-textual implications (social, political, etc.) of the novel we’re reading for that day.
Your keyword report will argue for the word’s significance and help us to see how focusing on that word will have implications for how we read the novel; your report will thus help shape and focus our discussion for the day.
Using Google Docs, create a single page poster/flier which includes a definition of the word and 1-5 textual examples. You must also include a two-page written report explaining the word’s significance.
- The word must be taken from the text directly; that is, it must actually appear in writing in the novel.
- You need to have anywhere from 1-5 passages from the text that use this word (if you have only 1, you must be prepared to argue more strenuously for the significance of this word).
- On the poster: include the passages and include a dictionary definition of the word
- Then include 2 pages of writing on the significance of the word in the novel; your task is to help us to see how the word resonates and ramifies throughout the novel.
You are responsible for viewing and responding to each of your peers’ reports by 11:59 PM the day after the report is due. A Google Doc will be available for each Keyword Report so so you can offer feedback.
Examples of keywords to get you thinking:
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: parents, invisibility
- Pride and Prejudice: fine eyes
- Beloved: story, remembering
- The Lord of the Rings: master
- Moby Dick: white, sea
- Robinson Crusoe: story, cannibal
- Jane Eyre: changeling, heart
- Heart of Darkness: horror
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Criticism Presentation
Choose two articles from the “Criticism” section of your novel (in the Norton edition): one from the “early views” sub-heading and one from the “modern views” sub-heading.
Using Google Slides, create a brief presentation that provides us with a mini-cheat sheet for each article. For each article, include at least one slide for the following:
- What is the article’s topic?
- In one or two “elevator pitch sentences,” what is its main focus/argument/claim?
- List five of its most interesting, surprising, or notable points (provide quotes or pagination references using MLA citations).
- Using one sentence, describe its tone
Feel free to zazz your presentation up as much as you’d like!
You are responsible for viewing and responding to each of your peers’ presentations by 11:59 PM the day after the presentation is due. A Google Doc will be available for each Criticism Presentation so so you can offer feedback.
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Reading Responses
You must complete a total of five reading responses; see the schedule for specific prompts.
You are responsible for submitting each reading response in Google Drive by 11:59 PM on the day it is due.
In lieu of classroom discussions, you will be responsible for reading and reacting to your peers’ work online. For each reading response, you will be grouped with 2 or 3 other students. You are required to engage with their thoughts within the following 24 hours.
For example:
The first reading response, “Austen and Me: Epistolary Response,” is due in Google Drive by 11:59 PM on January 2. You will need to read and react to your peers’ reading responses by 11:59 PM on January 3. This means that one most days, you will have both a reading response and peer comments due on the same day.
Please contact me if you have any questions about the schedule.
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Salon and Tea
At our final high tea and salon, each Jane-ite will prepare a 10 minute presentation on a final Austen salon topic of their choice.
Perhaps you will introduce us to one of the texts we did not read? Or share a biographical interpretation, a printing history tale, a close reading, a reception history, the current use of Austen in neuroscience, game theory, etc.? Or perhaps introduce us to a favorite Austen iteration, mashup, adaptation, theme, kitsch object, sequel, interpretation, inspiration, or source of delight horror or interest and explain why it matters? You might share an Austen inspired book you have made and talk about its import, or a poem you have written, or a film you’ve made? Or maybe you’ve figured out how to make an Austen-era menu or a housekeeping guide or mapped Austen’s Bath?
Samples from last year include:
- A Hollywood pitch (via powerpoint) for an updated version of P and P including casting, new setting, etc.
- A summary and film clips about Persuasion as if it were a Goodreads/Book Club presentation
- A reenactment of a ballroom dance scene, including dance lessons
- A presentation on the Lizzie Bennet Diaries, one on P and P and Zombies, one on fictional updates, etc
You must turn in a handout with this presentation. The handout is a quick guide to what you’ve done.
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Grading Standards
| Participation/Preparedness (reading, thinking, speaking, engaging) | 10 |
| Reading Responses (5 responses at 6 points each) | 30 |
| Cultural Report | 10 |
| Criticism Presentation | 15 |
| Keyword Presentation | 15 |
| Online Peer Engagement (written reactions to peers’ reading responses, presentations, and reports) |
10 |
| Salon Presentation | 10 |
| TOTAL: | 100 Points |
Written work is graded by:
- its careful, thoughtful fulfillment of each part of the assignment
- its grammatical, logical, and syntactical clarity
- its mechanical and surface correctness
JANE AUSTEN 