FORMS & TRANSFORMS

IN

PASTORAL TRADITION

Professor John Van Sickle SPRING 1996
University of the South, University of Tennessee, Chattanooga,
Vanderbilt University

Aims of the Course

The following Syllabus presents some of the approaches to reading pastoral that I have developed through writing & teaching. Two of my most important teaching experiences have been lectures & a seminar at Rome University (La Sapienza) for the bimillennium of Virgil's death in 1982 (published 1986) & a Humanities Seminar in 1994 at Brooklyn College.

The Rome experience firmed up my sense of how one poet, Virgil, took hold of poetic tradition & transformed it. Coming back to the matter in an interdisciplinary seminar at Brooklyn helped me to concentrate my thinking about the past & to open up unexpected forms of connection with poets from the Renaissance down to our own century.

The present course, then, will begin by refocusing a formative strain in Greco-Roman pastoral in order to revise still further & sharpen readings in later tradition. My role in this will be twofold: not only to convey my own approach to these texts & their interweaving but also to elicit, encourage & coordinate the strengths, interests & insights of members of the seminar. I expect that the viewpoints & information developed in the first part of the course (revising received notions of ancient pastoral) will lead to revisions of opinion regarding the later texts. In particular, I hope that the course will provide a forum in which graduate students (prospective teachers & scholars) can share & evaluate recent scholarship & criticism from their diverse fields.

SYLLABUS

Case studies in the roots & metamorphoses of a mode of thinking: from the early Mediterranean precursors & contested origin (Theocritus? Virgil?), through some complex departures in return (Garcilaso de la Vega, Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, Frost).

Background lectures, discussions shaped by members of the seminar reporting from their disciplinary perspectives. Two short working papers & one longer, final essay.

WEEK of SEMESTER 

1   INTRODUCTION: Moses, Hesiod, Homer, Plato; motifs of time (chronos),

place (topos) & displacement (chronotopology?), memory, love, origin &

return; ecphrasis, intertextuality, recursion.
 Metaphors {MR}

herdsman : lover / poet :: herding : minding.



2   THEOCRITUS [c3 BCE]: 'idylls' [tr. Wells, Penguin] 1, 2, 3, 4



3      "                "               5, 6, 7,

11



4   VIRGIL [70-19 BCE]: 'eclogues' [=Book of Bucolics [tr. Lee, Penguin] 1, 2, 3



5      "                "               4, 5, 6



                        Working essay due: 3 to 6 well-made paragraphs

                        on a topic as sketched below.



6      "                "                  7, 8, 9, 10



7   SPENSER [1552?-1599]: Shepheardes Calender  1, 4, 6



8      "                "                  9, 10, 11, 12



9      "             Faerie Queene       Sixth Book 1-7; Cantos IX-XII



10  GARCILASO [1539?-1616]



                        Working essay due: 4 to 7 well-made paragraphs

                        on a topic as sketched below.



11  MILTON [1608-1674]                   Lycidas



12  WORDSWORTH [1770-1850]  Preludes [Stillinger, ed, Riverside] Book I



13  FROST [1875-1963] North of Boston [Pritchard, ed. Signet] pp. 73-106



14     "                "              pp. 107-158

[As future teachers you may be interested in the kind of hints I feel it necessary to give my undergraduate students these days]

ESSAYS: Typed, double-spaced, ample margins, with paragraphs carefully made: strong topic sentence, supported by carefully selected examples that unfold the argument, which should be conducted by way of clearly articulated transitions from sentence to sentence and from one paragraph to the next. Papers handed in on time may be revised.

TOPICS: comparison among assigned texts strongly suggests itself (cf. intertextuality above), with attention to return & transformation of structures & motifs in changed cultural contexts. Always start with analysis of the overall structure & argument of any poem you discuss. Especially scrutinize motifs of time, place & displacement, poetics: 'when' & 'where' the chronotope must be related to action, 'what' each character does or tells of doing in the present, future & past. Narratives emerge & spill over & out of the pastoral frame, when they do not annihilate it, as in Book Six of the Faerie Queene. Poetics habitually reflect on their own craft.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS: 40 percent preparation & participation in class discussion; 30 percent two short essays; 30 percent final essay.

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