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English 435: Seminar Johnson's Moral Essays W.C. Dowling Fall, 2012 Tues, Thurs 1:10 - 2:30 Scott 221
Samuel Johnson was the dominant literary figure in later 18th-century England, so central to his time that the period has ever since been called the Age of Johnson. He was a poet, a great classical scholar, maker of the first important English dictionary, author of the "oriental tale" Rasselas, and the most brilliant conversationalist in an age of memorable conversation. (His conversation survives, just as it was heard around the dinner tables of 18th-century London, in Boswell's great Life of Samuel Johnson.) At the center
of Johnson's literary achievement are his "moral essays,"
his contribution to the eighteenth-century genre of the periodical
essay. As invented by Steele and Addison in The Tatler
and The Spectator, these were short, topical, and very
often satiric sketches of life in early eighteenth century London,
meant to show readers how to imagine At midcentury, however, Johnson made over the periodical essay as modern version of "wisdom literature": a searching examination of human moral psychology and the pitfalls and self-delusions to which every mortal man and woman -- and, as he well knew, Samuel Johnson -- is doomed in a world in which even the wisest see as through a glass darkly. Cathedral in Lichfield, Johnson's birthplace The great monument of Johnson's moral writings is his essay series The Rambler, to which we will devote most of our attention. But in two other series, The Idler and The Adventurer, he remains at his incomparable best as a companion of those who are seeking to understand themselves and their relation to the particular human society into which they were born. We will read selections from those series as well. At the heart
of Johnson's moral writings lies a conviction that the true subject
of literature is a universal human moral nature that remains
the same underneath what he once calls the "adventitious
and separable disguises" of historical period, nation, or
social class. A typical Rambler or Idler is based
on a kind of wager: if we come to recognize ourselves in the
mirror of Johnson's writing, we will have done so only by assenting
to his own notion of a universal human nature:
I'm quoting this passage for a reason. Johnson's moral writings are "hard," and it takes weeks of patient close analysis to learn to read his style -- it's called Ciceronian, or "periodic" prose -- comfortably. If you're thinking about taking the seminar, you should see what you can do with the passage. As you might have noticed just from this paragraph, reading Johnson means expanding your vocabulary. If you don't know exactly what he means by adventitious, for instance, or fortune, or discriminations and peculiarities, or heedful, or quick, or obstructed by danger, the whole thing isn't going to make much sense to you. And even if you do understand all those words, there's still the problem of following Johnson through the twists and turns of his magisterial syntax. It's a real literary and intellectual discipline. The good news
is that English majors who are comfortable with earlier English
literature become magically adept at reading Johnson's prose
within a few weeks. It's in a way like learning a new language,
and then discovering that you've been speaking that language
all along and didn't know it. If you can read The text we'll use is Samuel Johnson: Selected Essays, edited by David Womersley. It's a Penguin paperback with decent notes, to which I'll be adding a great deal of background material as we go along. Assignments will be short. There will be quizzes every week, to make sure that everyone is putting in time with the OED and close analysis of Johnson's prose. The final weeks will be given over to seminar papers: 25-minute oral presentations that, as each concentrates on a different aspect of Johnson's literary career and the periodical essay as a genre, will contribute to a sum total of knowledge for the class, and (2) will provide the basis of a longer (15-page) seminar paper to be handed in by that student on the last day of class. |
and easily offended; impetuous and irritable
in his temper, but of a most humane and benevolent heart; having
a mind stored with a vast and various collection of learning
and knowledge, which he communicated with peculiar prespicuity
and force, in rich and choice expression.
themselves as citizens of a new urban
society in which money and commerce, rather than the older customs
of a rural or agrarian England, were becoming the dominant forces
in an emergent modernity.
Shakespeare or Milton
or Jane Austen or Browning without undue difficulty, you won't
have any problem with the seminar. If those authors seem "difficult"
to you, or if you've had no experience at all reading earlier
English literature, you should probably think twice about taking
the course.