L736 25347 SORENSEN (#3)
Age of Johnson

2:30p – 5:30p R

TOPIC: THE “NATIONAL POPULAR” AND EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH CULTURE

This seminar takes as its starting point the concept of
the "national-popular," Antonio Gramsci’s term for describing the
position of the “masses” within the culture of a nation. If, as many
historians have argued, the eighteenth-century saw the expanded
development of cultural nationalism within Britain, how was space
made for “the people” or “the vulgar” (the eighteenth-century’s
approximate term for “the masses”) within that increasingly
inclusivist vision of Britain? As we read a wide range of novels,
verse, ballads, glossaries, and widely-circulated engravings
of “Cries of London” (the Lilly has one of the world’s largest
collections of these), we shall be especially attentive to language
and depictions of orality as means of representing the people.
Samuel Johnson’s monumental Dictionary of the English Language
established an authoritative standard print English, but we shall
consider it alongside the representations of slang, provincialisms,
and maritime jargon that fascinated eighteenth-century writers and
readers in works from Henry Fielding’s Jonathan Wild to Francis
Grose’s notorious Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. By the
second half of the century, many claimed these languages more
accurately represented the British people, and we shall explore the
specific and often problematic terms upon which these revaluations
of “sub-standard” languages incorporated the people into national
discourse. As we study an age often obsessed with national histories
and stories of origins, for instance, we shall think about the “back-
dating” of the people—the people as anachronism—in narratives that
link them to “originary” provincial languages and oral ballads. As
we reflect on an historical period in which huge numbers of “the
people” actually traveled far beyond Britain’s borders as maritime
workers, we shall examine best-selling depictions of sailors’
technical jargon, such as William Falconer’s wildly popular epic The
Shipwreck, and their stark contrast to the potential trans-
nationalism of the people. In an Enlightened age of print, of
refinement, of cosmopolitanism, the newly-visible British people
frequently appear as residual keepers of a national oral culture,
embodied and stubbornly provincial. What rhetorical strategies
helped locate them there, to what effect, and what evidence do we
have of a people’s writing that might have challenged such
representations? As we take up these questions we shall likely read
novels by Defoe, Fielding, and Tobias Smollett, verse of Thomas
Chatterton, Robert Burns, William Falconer, and other laboring class
poets, ballad collections by Joseph Ritson, John Pinkerton, David
Herd and Mrs. Brown of Falkland, glossaries by Anne Wheeler, John
Collier, and Francis Grose, and engravings by William Hogarth,
Francis Wheatley, John Ryland, and Thomas Rowlandson. Recent
critical writings might include those of Dipesh Chakrabarty,
Srinivas Aravamudan, Kathleen Wilson, John Richetti, Raymond
Williams, Margaret Cohen, Paula McDowell and Maureen McLane.

Requirements will include formal class presentations, online
postings on readings, informed class participation, and ongoing
research for a seminar-length (20-page) paper due at the end of
semester.