English 190

We will study the poetry and prose that emerged from the remarkable collaboration (and competition) between William and Dorothy Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, written in the tumultuous decades around 1800. We will devote some of our time to questions raised by the complexity of collaborative authorship itself: matters of property and possession, conversation and miscommunication, friendship, influence, ventriloquism, and plagiarism. Moreover, since these three writers witnessed a time and a place rapidly changing under the pressures and effects of war, vagrancy, industrialization, and capitalism, we will study their ways of representing and responding to the flux around them – conditions that remain with us, in a later form, more than 200 years later. This class will culminate in a study of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a commentary on the dangers of solitary authorship and the failure to collaborate.

Along with our readings, you will receive guidance from me and from your peers about conducting research, learning how and where to integrate literary criticism and theory into your writing, and the process of constructing and revising a longer paper over time.

This class is planned for synchronous instruction.