The Sublime

Professor
J. Jennifer Jones

Participation: 15%

Participation includes reading the assigned and suggested texts and coming to our seminar meetings prepared to discuss them. At minimum, you should have studied the primary texts carefully enough to have a working sense of their principle arguments and forms, as well as a sense of how form and content work together to produce the overall effects of the given texts. I expect you to come to class prepared to participate in general discussion and respond to both myself and your peers, to articulate specific aspects of the texts you find particularly interesting and/or troubling, and to bring questions, concerns, and critiques to the table.

Short Essays: 40%

You will write four short essays (each to be no more than two pages) over the course of this seminar. All formal essays you submit in this class must be formatted according the standards of MLA documentation and must be polished arguments that include a thesis, relevant textual evidence to support the thesis, and analysis of that evidence to as a means of demonstrating the significance of the evidence to the thesis and in turn the veracity of the thesis itself. If you submit your work on time, you will earn the right to revise your essays over the course of the term. In an idea world, you and I will establish a dialogue based on your writing that will be on-going throughout the semester.

Seminar Paper: 45%

Your seminar paper is the culmination of your work in this class. You may write on any topic you wish as long as it incorporates at least one text from the course and grapples with the concept of the sublime in some way. This paper, which should be at least 10 pages in length, should comprise original thought, by which I mean a position articulated through analyses and argumentation supported by careful close readings and by critical/historical research. You are welcome to put various texts into dialogue (historical theory, poetry, prose, fiction, criticism, contemporary theory, &). You are welcome to supplement the text(s) you choose from our syllabus with other texts. And you may be as interdisciplinary as you like in that regard as long as you bring scholarly integrity to the texts you choose (i.e., you may consult visual texts, historical texts, political texts and so on).

Seminar Papers are due by Monday, May 7 by noon via electronic submission to my email address. If you wish to receive your essay back with commentary, please provide a large stamped, self-addressed envelope to me at our last seminar meeting. To be safe, please make sure the envelope is equipped with enough postage for at least 20 pages.

Longinus, On the Sublime. 1 A.D. Trans. W. H. Fyfe; Rev. D. A. Russell. Loeb Classical Library, 1996.
ISBN: 0674995635

 John Milton, Paradise Lost. 1674. Ed. Gordon Teskey. New York: Norton, 2005.
ISBN: 0393924289

The Book of Job. Trans. Stephen Mitchell. New York: Harper Perennial, 1992. ISBN: 0060969598

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. 1757. Ed. James T. Boulton. Indiana: U of Notre Dame P, 1993.
ISBN: 0268000859

Immanuel Kant. The Critique of Judgement. 1790. Trans. James Creed Meredith. New York: Oxford UP, 1978. ISBN: 0198245890

Anne Radcliffe. The Italian. Ed. Frederick Garber. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.
ISBN: 0198245890

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey. Ed. Marilyn Gaull. New York: Longman, 2004.
ISBN: 0321202082

Suggested Texts

Michael Greer. What Every Student Should Know About Citing Sources with MLA Documentation. New York: Longman, 2006.
ISBN: 0321447379

Joseph Gibaldi. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 6th Rev. Edition. MLA P, 2003
ISBN: 0873529863

Diana Hacker. A Writer’s Reference. 5th Sprl edition. Bedford/St. Martin's P, 2003.
ISBN: 0312412622

Course Requirements

Participation (15%)
4 Short Essays (40%)
Seminar Paper (45%)