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Marsh
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V611 Interdisciplinary Study of Victorian Britain
H 680 Cultural History of Industrial Society
L680 Transatlantic 19th-Century Domesticity
L645 Victorian Fiction
This course cuts several swathes
through the rich field of nineteenth-century fiction, highlighting such issues
and subjects as: Romantic inheritances; the "birth" of the Victorian novel;
women's writing & New Woman fiction; writing as a profession; censorship and
offensiveness; "industrial" fiction; the "Newgate"
novel; serialization and the novel market; "sensation" fiction"; "decadence" and
the fin de siecle; Victorian "realism(s)";
loss of faith and faith in the novel; "Darwinian" narrative; the Victorian
bestseller; fiction and illustration; fiction of/andEmpire;
theatrical and cinematic adaptation. Main texts: Shelley,
Frankenstein; Dickens, Oliver Twist; Gaskell, North and South;
Collins, The Woman in White; Eliot, Middlemarch; Haggard, She;
Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles; Gissing, New Grub Street; Grand,
The Beth Book. Principal secondary
reading will include: Showalter, Sexual Anarchy; Brantlinger,
Rule of Darkness; Beer,
L680, Transatlantic Nineteenth-Century Domesticity
The study of domesticity and
domestic ideology has been of the leading paradigms, over the last ten or
fifteen years, for research and thinking on nineteenth-century British and
American literature. This course
will take a trans-Atlantic approach to the study of the relation of
nineteenth-century literature and culture to ideologies and material practices
of domesticity. In the British
context, such essays, poems, and books as John Ruskin’s “Of Queens’ Gardens”,
Coventry Patmore’s “The Angel in the House,” and
Sarah Strickland Ellis’s The Women of England defined a model of
feminine identity and behavior tightly linked to an ideal of domestic virtue and
care for the home. The home
emerged as a purported feminized haven from the ravages and violence of a
masculine marketplace and economy – a haven in which, however, men, as well as
women, were enjoined to seek refuge.
Novels by the Brontës, Dickens, Elizabeth
Gaskell, and George Eliot, and poetry by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Cristina
Rossetti, and Tennyson, respond to, complicate, and contribute to such
representations of the home as refuge.
In the American context, the study of domesticity illuminates the
original New England canon in works like Melville’s Pierre and
“Bartleby” -- which can be read as critiques of
domestic ideology and literature – and
L743, Victorian Literature/ Media/ Communications
This seminar will examine Victorian literature’s position within a nineteenth-century media ecology that includes, for example, the post office, railroad, camera, telegraph, phonograph, and typewriter; the newspaper, magazine, three-volume book, serially-published chapter; the novel, the dramatic monologue, the essay. We may think of these as different kinds of things: technologies or institutions, forms of publication, and literary genres or forms. They may all, however, be considered as elements of a nineteenth-century public sphere in which the recording and transmission of information, language, and images were undergoing unprecedented transformation. As one critic writes, "The nineteenth century would become increasingly familiar with expressions of the human spirit separated in time and space from the bodies of their makers – photographic images, telegraph signals, voices from the phonograph, telephone, and wireless, and moving images." In the earlier decades of the century, we can look for comparable effects produced by the post office and mail service, the explosion in print culture in the 1830s, and the development of a national railway system in the 1840s. Literary and cultural critics have only begun to answer the question of how Victorian literature responded to, represented, and was shaped by such transformations in the technologies and media of communications.
L743 Victorian Heretics”
This course explores the intellectual underside of later Victorian culture through the writings of a broad range of “other” Victorians: agnostics, atheists, political misfits, social outcasts, and sexual rebels. Topics will include: loss of faith, blasphemy, obscenity, pornography, censorship, “Naturalism,” and publishing practices. Texts and authors will include: Mrs. Humphry Ward, Robert Elsmere; Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm, short stories; Emile Zola, La terre [The Earth/Soil] (translation; extracts); George Moore, A Mummer’s Wife, Literature at Nurse; Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts and A Doll’s House (translation); George Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism; Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, “Candour in English Fiction”; Oscar Wilde, Salome and De Profundis. Subsidiary primary texts: Christmas number of The Freethinker; W.T. Stead, “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” Pall Mall Gazette; Teleny (attrib. Wilde et al). Secondary reading will include material by: Michel Foucault, Elaine Showalter, Stephen Arata, Walter Kendrick, Donald Thomas, Steven Marcus, Roger Shattuck, John Sutherland, and Oliver Buckton. Each participant will present a seminar paper of approximately 20 pp. at the end of the semester, and will give an oral presentation to the class.
V611 Interdisciplinary Study
of Victorian
This course is, emphatically, a survey, open to students interested in any aspect of nineteenth century studies in any discipline—romanticists, Victorianists, historians, historians of art and of science, folklorists. We will have two principal aims: the analysis of the methods of different disciplines devoted to the study of the nineteenth century and the rhetorical analysis of various forms of professional writing. And we’ll pursue these two aims simultaneously, on the thought that one way to learn about the intersection of disciplines is through careful study of the ways that their practitioners write their conference proposals, conference papers, and articles. (We’ll write parodies some of these—a cheap assignment, yes, but an instructive one too). Writing assignments will include a conference proposal, an annotated bibliography, and a conference paper. Along the way, we should develop a preliminary understanding of the current state of interdisciplinary study of the nineteenth century, and a hopeful sense of the intriguing, valuable research and teaching that remains to be done.
This semester V611 will also
take advantage of an extraordinary opportunity: the joint
conference of two interdisciplinary societies, the North American
H680 Cultural History of Industrial Society
This course examines industrial capitalism as a hegemonic
cultural system that invades all aspects of daily life.
It maps key metaphors of industrial society; the market, the
chimney, the street, the parlor, the garden, the bar, the clock, the machine,
the commodity, the empire.
Through both written and visual sources, the course explores how these metaphors
conditioned men’s and women’s behavior and consciousness, focusing on
L743 Ethics, Cultural Criticism, and Victorian Literature
L743 will focus on two large topics: the ethical dynamics of Victorian writing and the status of ethics in current literary criticism. Recent years have seen a much heralded "return to ethics" in literary and cultural studies. Inspiration for this return has come, for the most part, from the writing of continental philosophers: Levinas, Derrida, Irigaray, and Foucault most prominently. But there has also been, on the part of Anglo-American philosophy, a resurgence of interest in ethics and in the relation between literary and ethical studies. Writing by Martha Nussbaum, Cora Diamond, Stanley Cavell, Iris Murdoch and, to a lesser degree, Richard Rorty and Alexander Nehamas have all contributed to this new interest. In L743 we will read the writing of both Anglo-American and Continental moral philosophers alongside Victorian texts which bear on the concerns they raise. Among the Victorian dynamics I imagine us addressing are these: the helplessness of reading and the moral designs of Victorian prose; envy; Victorian skepticism; knowingness; the theatrical display of thought; and, importantly, the workings of imitation and exemplarity. Some of the questions I imagine asking of current literary criticism include: How does the return to ethics alter modes of reading developed within literary disciplines? How does the ethical accord with the historical and political imperatives that have driven much recent literary and cultural studies? What can be understood by the privileging of realism and the novel by these philosophers? Possible Victorian texts include novels by Eliot (either Deronda or Middlemarch) and Dickens (Copperfield or Great Expectations), dramatic monologues by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, and Augusta Webster, essays and lectures by F.H. Bradley, Florence Nightingale, J.S. Mill, Matthew Arnold, F.D. Maurice, and Leslie Stephens. Students will write a seminar paper, participate in a workshop on professional writing, and prepare talking points for several seminar meetings. Other texts and topics are warmly welcomed and students who would like to talk about the seminar and its concerns in advanced should feel free to get in touch; I'd be eager to discuss the course with you.
