09:30A-10:45A TR
TOPIC: SECRET SUBJECTS, SPECTATORS, AND SPIES
From its beginnings the novel has been linked with the technologies and interests that created the information age we now inhabit. The eighteenth century witnessed the growth in Europe of cities: social spaces where a man might engineer his own disappearance. As the workplace was increasingly separated from the home, and as "man's" sphere was increasingly separated from "woman's" sphere, Europeans were more and more likely to think of their lives as being divided up between the categories of public experience and private experience. The postal system--a public technology for the transportation of private feeling--was an eighteenth-century invention. So were bureaucracies, which rendered private individuality a category for the State's statistical investigation. The master spirits of the eighteenth century and of its novels are, arguably, the spy, the police informer, and the blackmailer.
We will consider the part that five or six eighteenth-century novels and one "Romantic" novel played in these historic re-definitions of privacy, of individuality, and of the public sphere. In a sense we will try to read the novels on our syllabus as blueprints for present day detective novels and spy thrillers (and try to think about why novel readers like mysteries anyhow).
Our readings will likely include six or seven of the following texts: Daniel Defoe, Roxana, or, The Fortunate Mistress; Eliza Haywood, Fantomina or, Love in a Maze; Eliza Haywood, The British Recluse, or, The Secret History of Cleomira, Suppos'd Dead; Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady; Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy; Choderlos de Laclos, Dangerous Liaisons; William Godwin, Caleb Williams, or, Things as They Are; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus. I'll be asking you to write two medium-sized papers (6-7 pages), perhaps a couple of rather unorthodox assignments, and a long take-home final exam (8-10 pages).