DIVINE MADNESS: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Assia Wevill, and the Nature of Biography
A Blended Course, with Face-to-Face and On-line Components – CRN #13102
PROVISIONAL SYLLABUS
A more extensive Course Calendar is available under the course name on D2L under CONTENT .
If there are any discrepancies, please consider the D2L Course Calendar to be correct.
Fall 2013
Room 120B, Whitby Hall
Monday nights, 6-9:15, starting September 9: face-to-face meetings; on-line component during the week.
Instructor: Susan Welch
Phone (612) 370-0771
E-mail: srwelch@stkate.edu.
Office: 119 Whitby Hall
Office Hours: Monday and Wednesday, 5-6, and by appointment
COURSE DESCRIPTION AND OBJECTIVES
1) Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, wife and husband and star-crossed lovers, were also two of the most accomplished poets of the twentieth century. For the six years of their marriage they were intense collaborators in each other’s work, and Hughes was largely responsible for shaping and introducing the public to Plath’s oeuvre after her death. One objective of the course is to investigate their lives and to examine the effect of their devastating breakup on the “divine madness” that allowed Plath to write her greatest work when she was experiencing the greatest pain of her life.
2) Another objective of the course is to explore the legitimacy of biography. Biography (a detailed description or account of someone’s life story) is a narrative that describes the self. Does it also create the self? We will be scrutinizing script theory, narrative theory and the idea of identity, gender in particular, as performance, in an effort to understand how biography works.
How close can biographies bring us to the “truth” of someone’s life, especially when those biographies (written texts as well as films and documentaries) widely vary? What patterns of looking at experience seem to create the most coherent ways of understanding?
3) The third course objective is to identify and characteristics of a few of Sylvia Plath’s and Ted
Hughes’ poems, and discuss how these poems relate to the facts and details of their lives.

4) The fourth course objective: By the end of the term each student should have her own theory of the Plath/Hughes relationship and how it affected their creativity. She should also have an idea of the nature of biography, the stories people tell themselves about who and what they are—and how these stories make and break our lives. The student’s theory will be presented in a final paper.
5) The fifth course objective: Learn to write a convincing argument. This course places a high importance on developing a wide repertoire of writing skills and improving those skills . There will be a strong emphasis on putting forward ideas, stating positions, then defending them persuasively. As a writing-intensive course, Divine Madness fulfills one-fourth of the University
Writing Requirement. Students will be asked to write weekly in various critical, reflective and analytical modes. They will submit a weekly poetry critique. For their final project, students will write an argumentative, analytical paper about some aspect of the Plath/Hughes relationship and its connection to their poetry, a paper worked through brainstorming, outlining, rough draft and final draft.
STUDENT SERVICES TO ENHANCE WRITING SKILLS
The O’Neill Learning Center offers daily one-on-one tutoring with student peers and professionals for most coursework on the St. Paul campus. This tutoring will be extremely valuable at the time when students are working on composing, outlining and drafting their final paper.
REQUIRED TEXTS
Becker, Jillian, Giving Up : The Last Days of Sylvia Plath (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2003).
Koren, Yehuda, and Negev, Eilat, A Lover of Unreason : The Life and Tragic Death of Assia
Wevill (Robson Books, London, 2006).
Moses, Kate, Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath (St. Martin’s, 2003).
Middlebrook, Diane, Her Husband : Ted Hughes & Sylvia Plath : A Marriage (Penguin, New
York, 2003).
Still in your possession, from taking The Reflective Woman, should be The Bedford Handbook
(Bedford/St. Martin’s) or another good guide to proper English grammar, composition, citation, and textual analysis.
COURSE ASSESSMENTS
To illustrate competence, students will

A.
Respond to each week’s writing assignment. Submit your responses via the D2L dropbox. As you write your responses, keep in mind the Course Objectives delineated above. Every week, I expect you to write about 4 pages, total, as follows:
1.
For each assigned segment of each book you are assigned, respond in the following way:
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Free : Do a 500-word free-write, a typical journal entry response. This should be an informal gathering of your thoughts.
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Quote : On the top of a new page, copy out a quote from the text, then respond to that quote in the space beneath it. Your response should be first person, addressed directly to the author or the text (“You make a very striking point here, which I agree with because, or I disagree with because…”
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Word : Choose a word that best describes the book so far. You should aim for a word that describes the book itself rather than your response to it. Then write a paragraph explaining why you chose the word you did.
Your dropbox submissions to me are due at 9 a.m. on Monday morning before class.
This submission plus your class discussion give you a total of 5 possible points. (5X7 equal
35 possible points toward your final grade for the term) You get an automatic 5 for today
(September 10) by being in class and being engaged in our discussion.
B.
Weeks 2-6 you will be assigned a Plath poem or a Hughes poem to analyze. Your postings are once again due to me at 9 a.m. on the Monday before class. We will discuss the poems in class. This assignment responds once again to all of the course objectives.
The poetry analysis will be included as part of your discussion/reading response (5 points possible every week), and will be assessed as part of that component.
Questions to ask when analyzing poetry:
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Who is speaking?
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Where is the poem taking place?
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What are the images?
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What happens in the poem? What’s the “story”?
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What do you see in your mind’s eye?
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What feelings do you have, and why?
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What sounds in the poem emphasize the visuals, the feelings?

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What gives the poem its energy?
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What makes you, the reader, interested in the poem?
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What does the poem remind you of in your own life?
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Write down your response to it using quotes from the poem . Link it up to themes and subjects from Plath and Hughes’s life as we are studying them in class.
C.
On-line Discussion (2 times, dates TBA) – 15 percen t of final grade.
D.
Rough draft of final paper ( 10 percent of final grade).
E.
Final paper of 5-7 pages, due on the last day of class, worked through free write, outlining, rough draft and final draft ( 40 percent of your grade).
ASSESSMENT OF DROPBOX SUBMISSIONS:
- A good response is relevant to the learning objectives of our course; it is substantial and concise; it responds to an important and significant issue raised by our texts and visual media; it’s thought-provoking, not just rote; it’s original. I’ll especially be looking for evidence of careful reading and viewing and an emotional stake in what’s being discussed as one of the course objectives is that students develop a theory of what happened between Plath and Hughes and one needs to care to come up with such a perspective.
O Points
—No post was turned in or it was late.
2 Points —This post was turned in on time.
If --in addition to your timely text response and poetry critique -- you do a satisfactory job of contributing to our in-class discussion, you will receive 5 points.
SUBMITTING ASSIGNMENTS
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All work must be word-processed with your name, date, course number and name of the assignment at the top of the page.
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All work must be saved and submitted as either .rtf, .doc, or.docx file (I cannot open .wsp or other kinds of files).
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All work must be submitted via D2L within the Dropbox feature.

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Due dates are NOT flexible. Late work will be accepted up to four days after the due date, with a penalty of a one-point deduction per late day. After four days, the score will be zero.
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I will be using D2L as a means to post assignments, announcements and grades, and feedback on assignments.
IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT PLAGIARISM
In this class, you will be reading books that have had much written about them online. I have read the reviews in Wikipedia, Amazon, Monkey Notes, Spark Notes, blogs, and other such sources. There are numerous websites devoted to Plath and Hughes. You will find articles and long discussions, scholarly and just plain gossipy. It’s actually very exciting that Plath and
Hughes continue to be so alive in our collective imagination and that they continue to inspire so much passion. I encourage you to read as much as you wish about the books and poetry. Very frequently these sources will bring new insights on the readings.
There is nothing at all wrong with this kind of research. The problem is when you use the words of another and represent them as your own words or ideas. This is plagiarism. So if you use the words from any source, you must both use quotation marks and provide a citation. If you use ideas from a source, you must use citations. If you have no quotation marks or citations, you are representing that the words and ideas are your own.
In other words, you must use citations for all direct quotes, paraphrases and summaries. If you don’t know how to cite, it is your responsibility to make an appointment with me immediately to go over citation methods.
I know that most of you will follow these guidelines out of a sense of ethical responsibility.
Please remember that illness, excessive work hours, difficult classes, etc., are good reasons to request an extension on an assignment, but they are not reasons to plagiarize, and they are certainly not excuses to plagiarize.
I advise you to read as many outside sources as you wish and then, before posting or doing your freewrites, to spend at least a day away from other people’s writing. Your own creativity will begin to work on what you’ve picked up from others’ imaginations and you’ll come up with fresh and original ideas of your own—at least some of the time!
The message should be clear: Do this work on your own.
Please use the following websites as guides and resources:
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Here is a link to go to for more information about what plagiarism is: http://www.clic.edu/plagiarism

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St. Kate’s Le Guide has a thorough discussion of plagiarism.
LIBERAL ARTS GOALS
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Critical and Creative Inquiry : The ability to gather, analyze and critically evaluate information to develop reasonable arguments, sound judgments, and effective solutions. This ability is founded on a broad knowledge of the achievements of human imagination and creativity and the variety of disciplinary approaches for exploring truths.
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Effective Communication in a Variety of Modes : The ability to read, write, speak, view and listen effectively; the ability to present information in a clear and engaging manner.
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Purposeful Life long Learning : The ability to continue personal and professional development based on on-going self-assessment, feedback from others and new learning.
Responsibilities of Students and Instructor :
To be a successful student in this course, you must:
Show up and carry your weight. In order for us to have a true learning community, our participation in that community as both learners and teachers is essential to everyone’s success.
Have access to a computer and a reliable internet connection.
Be comfortable working on a computer.
Be comfortable using St. Kate’s email and D2L. Log in at least four times a week to the D2L class site and St. Kate’s email.
Develop ideas and be willing to share them.
People learn not only by reading books but by listening to others. We sharpen our ideas by trying them out on others and learning from their reactions.
Trust yourself and be willing to take risks. We need to take risks in order to learn. Playing it safe is sometimes appropriate, but in Divine Madness we should be willing not to play it safe.
Be willing to examine your own ideas with a critical eye.
If we are to learn from others, we need to be willing to change our minds when necessary. Being open to new ideas and being willing to challenge our own ideas are important qualities in any learner, student or teacher.

Be willing to examine others’ ideas critically and challenge them when appropriate.
Obviously we do not want to get into fights about our ideas, but we do want to challenge one another. The key is to respectfully disagree, with the goal of uncovering and clarifying our truths.
Pay attention to how you learn.
Learning how to learn—and how you learn-- is something that will help you throughout your life. And we’re all a little different. Some people do best with an organized, systematic approach, some with a blitzkrieg approach, others with a gradual, casual approach. I, your instructor, learn best by totally overwhelming myself with new information, perspectives, ideas, until I’m absolutely swamped; then, maybe a day or two or a week or two later, out of the mess that I’ve created, I slowly, surely, can detect a pattern. It’s taken me many years to become aware of this process and being conscious of it has helped me a lot. The more you pay attention to your own learning process, the more you will be able to improve and make it work for you.
Keep me posted. Are you having difficulty? Falling behind? Wondering what it is we are trying to accomplish here? I am here to help you in any way I can, but I can only do so if you let me know when something is wrong.
Have fun! Enjoy this learning process and the people in this class.
As the instructor, I will:
Check my email and D2L Monday through Friday at least two times a day. I will use email and D2L to communicate course content, post videos and post links to help student learning throughout the course. I will give feedback on assignments through D2L.
Respond to your questions and assess your work in a timely manner.
Encourage each student to express herself clearly and to take risks. To do this, I will at times ask probing questions that may seem too hard to answer. As in most things, it is the process of trying to discover what we believe that is important. Most of these questions will not have right or wrong answers, just answers at various stages of development.
Help each student to understand and learn from diverse points of view that might differ from her own. This means that I may sometimes take the opposite or different point of view from yours, even if I do not necessarily believe in it. Some call this “playing the devil’s advocate.” You may do the same with me to help me learn.
Encourage each student to do her best work. To do this, I will offer you feedback, critiques, and suggestions on your work.
Create a disciplined, intellectual workplace. This includes keeping an open mind, being willing to learn myself, and setting policies and processes that will help us all learn.

Being available to help students. I will hold office hours, but always feel free to make an appointment with me for another time if you cannot come in then. I always am on campus on
Mondays and Wednesdays, and frequently on other days. You can reach me at home any other day of the week. My cell is 612-370-0771. You can always call my office during office hours. I am rarely away from my e-mail for long: srwelch@stkate.edu
.
Please be assured that your views (however different they may be from others’ in the class) will not affect your grade (except when they are poorly articulated), and feel free to enter into the intellectual fray with the joyful abandon of a reflective woman.
CLASS PROCEDURES
During the first hours of every class, we’ll go over your responses to the reading and the poetry. Sometimes I’ll give a lecture first to help direct the discussion. I will talk about protocols for good writing. I will encourage you to share ideas from your own investigations that are helping you to deepen the terms of our discussion.
ATTENDANCE AND EVALUATION
Class attendance is essential. Your participation in our discussions is as important as any on-line aspects of the course. I will base your grade on your participation in class, the consistent quality of your postings and class discussion, the quality of your final paper worked through brainstorming, outline, rough draft and final draft.
Remember, unexcused absences will result in a poor grade.
COURSE CALENDAR
A more extensive course calendar is available under the course name on D2L under CONTENT.
This 7.5 week class meets for the first time on September 9, 2013, for three and a half hours. As part of our community-building, we will talk about what, if anything, students know about Plath and Hughes. We want to share with each other preconceptions we have about the couple, what our ideas and experiences are of their work, and why their story interests us. We will see a documentary shown on British TV the week after Sylvia Plath’s death.
September 9:
Discussion of Class Procedures
Introductions
Interactive Conversation about the Plath Documentary as we watch it

Analysis of “Eurydice” (below) as practice for weekly poetry analysis assignment and practice for our speculation about gender and female role models. I can’t help but think Carol Ann Duffy had Hughes in mind (among others) as she dreamed up this poem. For background, check out
Orpheus and Eurydice if you’re not familiar with the myth.
As Britain’s Poet Laureate, Duffy, (one of Ted Hughes’s successors in the Laureate post) reflects in her poem “Eurydice” :
Girls, I was dead and down in the Underworld, a shade, a shadow of my former self, nowhen.
It was a place where language stopped, a black full stop, a black hole
Where the words had come to an end.
And end they did there, last words, famous or not.
It suited me down to the ground.
So imagine me there, unavailable, out of this world, then picture my face in that place of Eternal Repose, in the one place you’d think a girl would be safe from the kind of a man who follows her round writing poems, hovers about

while she reads them, calls her His Muse, and once sulked for a night and a day because she remarked on his weakness for abstract nouns.
Just picture my face when I heard—
Ye Gods – a familiar knock-knock at Death’s door.
Him.
Big O.
Larger than life.
With his lyre and a poem to pitch, with me as the prize.
Things were different back then,
For the men, verse-wise,
Big O was the boy. Legendary.
The blurb on the back of his books claimed that animals, aardvark to zebra, flocked to his side when he sang, fish leapt in their shoals at the sound of his voice, even the mute, sullen stones at his feet

wept wee, silver tears.
Bollocks. (I’d done all the typing myself,
I should know.)
And given my time all over again,
Rest assured I’d rather speak for myself
Than be Dearest, Beloved, Dark Lady, White Goddess etc., etc.
In fact girls, I’d rather be dead.
But the Gods are like publishers, usually male, and what you doubtless know of my tale is the deal.
Orpheus strutted his stuff.
The bloodless ghosts were in tears.
Sisyphus sat on his rock for the first time in years.
Tantalus was permitted a couple of beers.
The woman in question could scarcely believe her ears.
Like it or not,
I must follow him back to our life—
Eurydice, Orpheus’ wife—

to be trapped in his images, metaphors, similes, octaves and sextets, quatrains and couplets, elegies, limericks, villanelles, histories, myths…
He’d been told that he mustn’t look back or turn round, but walk steadily upwards, myself right behind him, out of the Underworld into the upper air that for me was the past.
He’d been warned that one look would lose me for ever and ever.
So we walked, we walked.
Nobody talked.
Girls, forget what you’ve read.
It happened like this—
I did everything in my power to make him look back.
What did I have to do, I said, to make him see we were through?
I was dead. Deceased.

I was Resting in Peace. Passé. Late.
Past my sell-by date…
I stretched out my hand
To touch him once on the back of the neck.
Please let me stay.
But already the light had saddened him from purple to grey.
It was an uphill schlep from death to life and with every step
I willed him to turn.
I was thinking of filching the poem
Out of his cloak,
When inspiration finally struck.
I stopped, thrilled.
He was a yard in front.
My voice shook when I spoke—
Orpheus, your poem’s a masterpiece.
I’d love to hear it again.
He was smiling modestly when he turned, when he turned and he looked at me.

What else?
I noticed he hadn’t shaved.
I waved once and was gone.
The dead are so talented.
The living walk by the edge of a vast lake near, the wise, drowned silence of the dead.
Maybe Assia and Sylvia figured death was the only way to outmaneuver Ted Hughes.
Remember—the D2L class site has an elaborate class calendar and instructions on how to proceed.
September 9:
Topic: Sylvia Plath and the World She Lived In.
Personal introductions. Go over syllabus: Course overview. This is the time to ask questions about how we are going to proceed.
Automatic 5 points today (September 9) for being in class and being engaged in our discussion.
As a class, we practice analyzing a poem using “Eurydice,” by Carol Duffy, printed in the syllabus. Assignment of Plath poem for next week. Preview of Becker book.
Video presentation of a documentary that was shown about Plath on British TV the week after her death in February of 1963.
September 16 :
Topic: Gender in the Plath’s World
By 9 a.m. on this day you should have read and responded to Giving Up , by Jillian Becker. Send your responses to me in the D2L Dropbox.. Find detailed instructions for preparing responses in both the syllabus and in the D2L Content segment.
In subsequent classes, you’ll be asked to analyze a poem. For this class alone, reflect on the picture you got of Plath in the documentary and the portrait that was presented by Becker (500 words).

This submission plus your discussion in class give you a total of 5 possible points . (5 possible points X 7 class sessions equals 35 possible points for your final grade for the term).
We will play in class an audio of the radio program featuring Plath and Hughes that Assia Wevill listened to (referred to in Becker’s book) when she was visiting the Beckers months before the affair started.
September 23 :
Topic: Theories of Narrative, Theories of Biography, Theories of Mind
By 9 a.m. on this day you should have read and responded to the first half of Her Husband , by
Diane Middlebrook (up to page 158) , and the one assigned Plath poem.
September 30:
Topic: Writing a Convincing Argument
By 9 a.m. on this day you should have read and responded to the second half (pp. 158-on) of Her
Husband , by Diane Middlebrook, and a Plath or Hughes poem.
October 7 :
Topic: Kate Moses visits!
Also: The how-to of your first posting assignment, which is to be done this week (7 points).
By 9 a.m. on this day you should have read and responded to the first half of Wintering and a
Plath or Hughes poem. Since this will be a rare opportunity to “meet the author,” it would be wonderful if you were able to finish the entire book. Be prepared with questions for Kate –her writing process, her “collaboration” with Diane Middlebrook as fellow Plath researchers—it wasn’t an official collaboration but they traveled to England together and became great friends— and her observations on women and creativity.
October 8:
Kate Moses gives a reading in the Art Building Auditorium, 7:00 p.m
October 14:
Topic: Brainstorming ideas for your final paper. As we go around the class, you should be prepared to give us a coherent idea of what your paper will be about. The class procedure for this segment will be to for each student to present her ideas and then for the rest of us to offer suggestions.

By 9 a.m. on this day you should have read and responded to Wintering in its entirety, and a
Plath or Hughes poem.
October 21:
Final class meeting and pizza party. Rough draft of final paper due in drop box at 9 a.m
(10 points). My goal is to have all papers returned to you with my comments by Thursday morning.
Topic: Class retrospective. Wrap up of the literature we have discussed and the discussion of second posting ( 8 points ).
Also, by 9 a.m. on this day, you should have read and responded to A Lover of Unreason .
Final paper due in the D2L dropbox by midnight on October 28. (40 points).