OUR GOALS
As the novel and drama are covered in separate courses we will focus on nineteenth-century poetry and nonfictional prose. Our poets will include Wordsworth, Tennyson, Arnold, Browning, Hopkins, and Christina Rossetti. Our prose writers are Pugin, Mill, Carlyle, Ruskin, Newman, Arnold, Darwin, Pater, and Yeats. We will make Dodgson’s Alice books our “parallel reading in the novel,” but will also briefly consider Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities and his Hard Times. For sake of comparison, we will also include the prose of two nineteenth-century American Victorian writers, Emerson and Adams, and one nineteenth-century French writer, Victor Hugo.
Instead of organizing these writers chronologically they will be integrated into a schedule set up to facilitate the following goals.
[1] Our first goal will be to incorporate two of the core values of this university: Leadership and Discovery.
[1A] To that end, we will adapt the discovery learning method promoted by the College of Natural Sciences to reading and writing. Discovery learning, also known as active learning , has been used in English courses to explore the inner world, but, like the natural sciences, we will start with the outer world. Hence for us “World” will mean primarily the world around you here on and near campus: the sense of the “world” as your “sphere of action or thought; the ‘realm’ within which one moves or lives” (OED). And we will expand the sense of “reading” as well: all of your world will be your text. We will approach it as semioticians, those who study all signs, linguistic and non-linguistic, including art, architecture, landscapes (geography), material culture (archeology), etc.
[1A1] Our goal is to learn to think for ourselves, decreasing reliance on secondary sources, practicing what is known as active, experiential or discovery learning (as in science experiments, the Moore method in math, and Amherst College’s Baird Freshman English course in the humanities) ; to know oneself, one’s strengths and weaknesses in learning, writing, reading, speaking, listening; improve our writing: our motivation (fear vs. love), our creativity (vs. writer’s block and perfectionism, etc. , ), time management (planning, goal setting, etc. vs. procrastination), concentration, polishing, punctuation, documentation, proofreading. Time management is vital in life, but especially in writing, because the secret of writing as discovery learning; of writing as innovative thinking; of writing as creativity; in short, of great writing, is rewriting. A key to rewriting is allowing enough time to elapse between drafts -- the opposite of procrastination. To teach the importance of this kind of time management, punctuation and proofreading will be stressed in the grading of student writing for they are good indications of how careful the student has been in his or her writing and how much time has been budgeted between drafts.
[1B] We will also adapt the leadership techniques of personal and leadership visions to formal writing. The first half of the semester will culminate in a personal vision, focusing on what the writer is most passionate about. The second half of the semester will culminate in a leadership vision, specifying the actions to be taken to fulfill the personal vision. In other words the ultimate goal of formal writing in the first half of the semester is:“to know thyself”: Self-awareness is essential not only for leadership, but for good writing for it enables self-management of time and emotional as well as intellectual resources. On the other hand, the goal of formal writing for the second half of the semester is: to know that which is greater than the ego: Better awareness of the world beyond the ego, beyond the conscious self, is not only a characteristic of a leader but enables a writer to be open to great inspirations and to be able to tap resources far greater than those of an isolated self. “Only connect” is one of the key mottoes of our course, especially as applies to connecting to that which is beyond the isolated self.
[2] Our goal is thus also unity, of the self, of the self and others, of the self and nature, of one subject and another, etc. Hence out course mottoes: "Only connect! . . .Live in fragments no longer.” E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910), ch. 22. “One day when I was twenty-three or twenty-four this sentence seemed to form in my head, without my willing it, much as sentences form when we are half-asleep, ‘Hammer your thoughts into unity’. For days I could think of nothing else and for years I tested all I did by that sentence [...]” William Butler Yeats (Nobel Prize, 1923; cited in Frank Tuohy, Yeats, 1976, p.51 )
[2A] This is a central principle of Newman’s Idea of a University, for Newman emphasizes again and again the necessity of synthesis, connection between the various courses and activities of university life, to achieve a strong sense of university education as the unity it is supposed to be rather than the fragmented multiversity it all too often is.
[2B] Our goal is to maximize our potential by cultivating both sides of our brains, developing all our multiple intelligences, via guided imagery, sympathetic imagination (extended even to animals and plants)
[2C] Our goal is to connect the verbal to the visual arts and rhetorics (to architecture, landscape architecture, sculpture, murals, paintings, drawings) and to music including popular music such as Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, Jefferson Airplane, etc.
[2D] Hence we want to learn the new “writing” of multimedia and the internet, connecting writing to drawing and the visual arts; to experience writing as the product of collaboration as well as isolation; to improve reading: read the whole world as a text (semiotics); develop reader-response journals integrating the right with the left brain; improve speaking in discussion and before groups, including presentations and acting; improve listening, concentration, and the sympathetic imagination.
[3] To increase our sense of connection with the world around us a related goal is to expand our sense of place (see Carnegie), especially of the campus as an alma mater, a second home, to cultivate a sense of place as querencia, inscape, instress, genius loci, etc. Better awareness of the world beyond the self is cultivated in part by becoming a better reader of the world, a semiotician (reader of signs) aware of the extraordinary impact of environment, the power of place and of history, that is, time embodied in place, as well as one’s “place” in time. Awareness of time embodied in place also entails consciousness of genii loci, the spirits of the great people embodied in a place such as this campus. Hence our aim is to
[3A] be inspired by the genii loci of our university; help us get to know our more famous alumni and faculty, past and present; help feel the presence of some of the famous spirits which haunt our campus, embodied in our campus sites (such as Waller Creek haunted by the genii loci of Joe Jones, Frank Dobie, and the students of 1969), and campus buildings, from the Littlefield House to the Humanities Research Center
[3B] become aware of time as embodied in place (fossils in Waller Creek, griffins in Littlefield House), to expand our consciousness of time to the origins of the planet and life on the planet, to integrate the meaning of the end of time for the body (death) and for a species (extinction) and to explore alternatives to consciousness of linear time
[3C] expand our personal sense of place (our road maps); sense of place in nature; sense of home as place; sense of school as place; sense of our university as place; sense of place in terms of both geography and culture; sense of infinite space, of our place in the universe; definition of our ideal place; sense of place in the history of the world and of our civilization, especially the dialectics between Hellenism vs. Hebraism, pastoral vs. urban, Greco-Roman vs. Gothic, modernism vs. antimodernism
[3D] define our college experience in terms of sense of place, especially by comparing it to that of others unlike ourselves, comparing U.T. to Oxford, for example, Austin, Texas, USA, to Europe; define our college experience in time, especially by comparing it to that of others unlike ourselves, such as those of students in the Middle Ages (1200-1500) and the Victorian eras (1837-1901).
places we may “read” on campus and in the rest of the world: Campus: the Main building, Battle Hall, Sutton Hall, the Littlefield House, electronic classrooms, campus classroom buildings, Waller Creek, the Biology Ponds (Tower Garden), Dobie’s house, Texas Memorial Museum, the Alumni Center, Texas Union, University Christian Church, the Univesity Catholic Center, University Baptist Church, University Methodist Church, All Saints Church, the Story of Texas museum; Austin: Treaty Oak, Taniguchi Oriental Garden, Hartman Prehistoric Garden, Austin Nature Center, Philosopher’s Rock, Barton Springs, Umlauf Sculpture Garden, Town Lake, the state Capitol building, St. Mary’s cathedral, the Driskill Hotel; Via the internet: Galveston, Oxford, Mt. St. Michel, Chartres, Notre Dame, ……