Censorships, Crimes, and Uncertainties in Victorian Literature and Culture

This seminar aims to explore the darker side of Victorian literature and culture through a series of units that bring together little-known materials with sometimes under-read canonical works in the context of issues that continue to perplex and disturb us: loss of faith; communicative failure; legal anarchy; death; inspired language and prophetic speaking; Bible criticism and the demise of the book of power; the impact of Darwinism; class struggle and the search for values; the threat and release of comedy; and the unholy trinity of obscenity, blasphemy, and realism. We will begin with the book that set the agenda for Victorian mental struggle, Carlyle's vertiginous Sartor Resartus(1833-4) and move from there to the exploration of narrative, legal, and epistemological uncertainties in Dickens's Bleak House (1852-3); supplementary material may include Carlyle's memoir of his friend Edward Irving, the center of an 1831 Scottish scandal about "speaking in tongues." The following weeks will encounter: Eliot's Middlemarch, Darwin's Origin, Tennyson's In Memoriam materials by Feuerbach, Strauss and other "Higher Critics" of the Bible; Arnold's Culture and Anarchy and satirical works by Samuel Butler; Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and De Profundis, with the transcript of his trial for sodomy; and the novel that closed the book on Victorian fiction, Thomas Hardy's explosively offensive Jude the Obscure. Secondary readings will include short pieces by Foucault, Gillian Beer, Elaine Showalter, and others.

Work for this seminar will include a 20pp. semester paper or equivalent(s) (with additional bibliography and notes toward future work on the subject), and two substantial class presentations, which may take the form of reports on books and research materials not covered in detail by the class as a whole. In addition, class members are required to post a question for discussion of our primary texts to the class e-mail group every week. I will take all of these elements (as well as general class contribution) into account in assigning final grades for the course. I view my role as that of guide, supporter, fellow-thinker, agenda-tweaker, focus-puller--whatever it takes to extend the range of our knowledge as a group furthest and to help individual class members personally take the most that they can from the class, as literary-cultural critics, intellectual historians, Victorianists, and future teachers of Victorian material.

Since both Bleak House and Middlemarch are enormously long and dense novels, it is highly recommended that prospective class members read and make notes on one or both texts before Spring semester; Carlyle’s Sartor is also a hard read, best approached in incremental bites of a chapter or two at a time. I do not require an interview before admission to the class, but do ask that students who decide to take it have some reasonable working knowledge of Victorian literature.