Frigga’s Day, March 29: Reason and the Troll King

  • Welcome! Gather paper, pen/pencil, wits!
  • Four MoreWeeks (and about those essays …)
  • Lecture/Presentation:Reason and The Troll King
  • GroupReading: Alexander Pope
  • Essay on Criticism
  • Essay on Man
  • CLOZE, Reading Guide
  • C'est la vie?

ELACC12RL-RI1: Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis

ELACC12RL-RI2: Analyze two or more themes or central ideas of text

ELACC12RI3: Analyze and explain how individuals, ideas, or events interact and develop

ELACC12RL4-RI4: Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in text

ELACC12RL6: Distinguish what is directly stated in a text from what is really meant

ELACC12RI6: Determine an author’s point of view or purpose in a text

ELACC12RI8: Delineate and evaluate the reasoning in seminal British texts

ELACC12RL-RI9: Analyze for theme, purpose rhetoric, and how texts treat similar themes or topics

ELACC12RL10: Read and comprehend complex literature independently and proficiently.

ELACC12W2: Write informative/explanatory texts to examine and convey complex ideas

ELACC12W4: Produce clear and coherent writing appropriate to task, purpose, and audience

ELACC12W9: Draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis

ELACC12W10: Write routinely over extended and shorter time frames

ELACC12SL1: Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions

ELACC12L6: Acquire and use general academic and domain-specific words and phrases

BritLitComp Assignments, Spring 2013

Unit Three: Reason, Truth, and “Monstrous Designs”

18 Nel MezzoDel Cammin: Where are we now, and where are we going?

19 Lecture/Presentation: Kill the King

20 John Milton, Areopagitica

21 John Milton, Paradise Lost

22 John Milton, Paradise Lost

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25 Intellectual Integrity: Reading and Teaching Milton and Orwell

26 Intellectual Integrity: Reading and Teaching Milton and Orwell

27 Intellectual Integrity: Reading and Teaching Milton and Orwell

28 Lecture/Presentation: The Age of Reason; Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, Essay on Criticism

29 Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, Essay on Criticism

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1 Infinite Jest: Jonathan Swift and the Satire of Outrage; Gulliver Project Intro

2 Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels: The Cute and the Gross (Lilliput, Brobdingnag)

3 Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels: The Smart and the Senile (Laputa)

4 Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels: The Wise and the Brutal (Houyhnhmns)

5 The Sleep of Reason: Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal

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8 “Chariot of Fire”: The Art and Vision of William Blake

9 William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience

10 William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads

11 William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads

12 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, “Frost at Midnight”

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15 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner

16 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner

17 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan

18 COMPUTER LAB – Notebooks, Reading Journals DUE; Work on Analytical Essay 3

19 COMPUTER LAB – Work on Analytical Essay 3

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22 COMPUTER LAB – Analytical Essay #3 DUE

23 Film: Time Bandits

24 Film: Time Bandits

25 Film/Play: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

26 Film/Play: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

The Age of Reason(1670s – 1790s)

aka “Enlightenment,” Neoclassical Age, PostRestoration, etc.

Inspired by Milton’s Right Reason, Age of Reason insists we use Reason, not Faith, to solve problems – God made us “sufficient to have stood, though free to fall” (PL III)

  • as distinct from an Age of Faith, which assumes that people cannot solve problems without constant Divine Guidance:
  • Directly (theocracies)
  • Indirectly (Divine Right of Kings)
  • New power of Parliament – Opinion matters, so Reason matters
  • Constitutional Democracy – government according to Reason (not birth / tradition – and we’re the first! USA!USA!)

The Age’s documents and writers profess belief in “Nature’s God” (Declaration) but insist on secular focus – wary ofovert intrusions of religion into politics (1649?)

  • Newton, etc. using Reason/Logic/Math to describe and predict movements of planets we had not even seen yet;surely we can use it can solve human problems like poverty, injustice, etc.?
  • All modern Sciences and Scientific Method
  • “Classical” Arts modeled on Greek philosophy of balance
  • Music – Bach, Mozart, etc. use mathematical structures
  • Architecture – US government buildings all look Greek
  • Literature – essays, criticism, satire, “heroic” verse, translations from Greek and Roman masterpieces

Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744)

The Troll King of the Age of Reason

Everything was against him!

  • Catholic when was “illegal”
  • Tory when Whigs dominant
  • Uglyin era ofClassical beauty: short (4’6”), deformed, weak, bad eyes, flatulent (Pott’s Disease)
  • MEANin era of“reason”; vicious and insulting to both enemies and friends
  • Yet this trollish misfit wasthe first English writer to make his living entirely from selling his writing
  • Political / Literary Criticism in Satirical Verse, aphorisms
  • Satire: writing makes fun in order to make a serious point
  • Aphorism:witty, memorable saying which teaches a truth
  • His verse was like Chaucer’s: iambic pentameter couplets
  • Most important works
  • Essay on Criticism – describes laws of art, politics, wit
  • The Rape of the Lock – satire about a fashion war
  • The Dunciad – satire about stupidity
  • Essay on Man – rebuttal of Milton on why Evil occurs

Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism (1711)

Selected Aphorisms from Essay on CriticismDiscuss or React to ANY TWO of these

50 wds each

'Tis with our Judgments as our Watches: none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own.

Of all the Causes which conspire to blind
Man's erring Judgment, and misguide the Mind,
What the weak Head with strongest bias rules,
Is Pride, the never-failing Vice of Fools.

Whatever Nature has in Worth denied,
She gives in large Recruits of needful Pride;
For as in Bodies, thus in Souls, we find
What wants in Blood and Spirits, swelled with Wind.

Trust not your self; but your Defects to know,
Make use of every Friend--and every Foe.

A little Learning is a dangerous Thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the Brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.

In Wit, as Nature, what affects our Hearts
Is nor th' Exactness of peculiar Parts;
'Tis not a Lip, or Eye, we Beauty call,
But the joint Force and full Result of all.

Some praise at Morning what they blame at Night;
But always think the last Opinion right.

Good-Nature and Good-Sense must ever join;
To err is Humane; to Forgive, Divine.

Alexander Pope, Essay on Man (1733)

Awake, my St. John! leave all meaner things

To low ambition, and the pride of kings.

Let us (since life can little more supply

Than just to look about us and to die)

Expatiate free o'er all this scene of man;

A mighty maze! but not without a plan;

A wild, where weeds and flow'rs promiscuous shoot;

Or garden, tempting with forbidden fruit.

Together let us beat this ample field,

Try what the open, what the covert yield;

The latent tracts, the giddy heights explore

Of all who blindly creep, or sightless soar;

Eye Nature's walks, shoot folly as it flies,

And catch the manners living as they rise;

Laugh where we must, be candid where we can;

But vindicate the ways of God to man.

Say first, Of God above, or man below,

What can we reason, but from what we know?...

Of systems possible, if 'tis confest

That Wisdom Infinite must form the best….

Respecting man whatever wrong we call,

May, must be right, as relative to all.

In human works, tho' labour'd on with pain,

A thousand movements scarce one purpose gain;

In God's, one single can its end produce;

Yet serves to second too some other use.

So man, who here seems principal alone,

Perhaps acts second to some sphere unknown,

Touches some wheel, or verges to some goal;

'Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.

All nature is but art, unknown to thee;

All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;

All discord, harmony not understood;

All partial evil, universal good.

And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,

One truth is clear: Whatever IS, is RIGHT.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,

The proper study of mankind is man.

Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state,

A being darkly wise, and rudely great….

Created half to rise, and half to fall;

Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;

Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd:

The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

CLOZE: Alexander Pope and the Age of Reason

  1. The Age of Reason, also known as The ______and The ______Age, is usually dated from the ______to the ______.
  2. The name comes from an insistence that people use ______to solve problems.
  3. This is distinct from an Age of ______, which assumes that people cannot solve problems without ______guidance – as in what two forms of government?
  1. What nation’s government was the first to be built on the principles of the Age of Reason?
  1. Define: secular
  2. Alexander Pope lived from ______to ______.
  3. He was an “outcast” in many ways: he was ______when that was illegal, a ______when the ______dominated politics.
  4. He also had severe physical problems, such as (name two):
  1. What was his personality like?
  2. Nonetheless, he became the first English writer to make his living how?
  1. Define satire:
  1. Define aphorism:

Reading Guide: Alexander Pope

  1. Discuss two aphorisms from Pope’s Essay on Criticism (do this directly on the reading sheet).
  1. In Essay on Man, Pope says that “life can little more supply / Than just to ______us and to ______.”
  2. He invites his friend to go with him and “shoot ______as it flies.”
  3. He says that his mission is to “______the ways of God to Man.”
  • (Milton had said his mission was to ______the ways of God to Man.”)
  1. “Say first,” says Pope, “of ______above, or ______below, What can we ______, but from what we ______?”
  2. Pope insists that, “Of systems possible, … Wisdom Infinite must form the ______.”
  • FREEWRITE (10 words): What does this mean?
  1. He says that, “whatever wrong we call,/…must be ______, as relative to ______.”
  2. We mistakenly think that “wrong” exists because “’Tis but a ______we see, and not the ______.”
  3. “One ______is ______,” says Pope, “Whatever ______, is ______.”
  4. Pope concludes we should “presume not ______to scan; / The proper study of mankind is ______.”
  5. He concludes that Man is “______judge of ______, in endless ______hurl’d; The ______, ______, and ______of the ______!”

Closing Freewrite (50 words): Do you agree or disagree with Pope on #9? Explain.

Today You Will Turn In:

  • Project Progress Journal #3
  • CLOZE: Alexander Pope and Age of Reason (includes Closing Freewrite at bottom)
  • READING GUIDE: Alexander Pope (includes freewrites on “Criticism” & “Man”)
  • Zero Make-Ups (SaturdaySchool) – GIVE DIRECTLY TO ME AT DESK