L743/V701 16030 KREILKAMP (#4)
Victorian Literature

11:15a – 2:15p T

TOPIC:  AROUND 1859: THE MID-VICTORIAN MOMENT

Over thirty years ago Fredric Jameson posed the deceptively simple
question:  "In what sense can Ulysses be said to be part of the
events which took place in 1922?”  More recently, a cluster of
critical texts – for example, James Chandler, England in 1819: The
Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism,
Michael North, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern,
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time, Peter
Stansky, On or about December 1910, Tom Lutz, American Nervousness,
1903, and Freidrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 – have
raised a set of questions and issues prompted by the dating of texts
or the association of texts with a single year or moment in
history.

This course will take a similarly synchronic approach to Victorian
literary and cultural history. We will be isolating one brief slice
of time -- Great Britain around 1859, traditionally understood as
the culmination of a brief “age of equipoise” in a turbulent
century – and reading a range of mostly but not entirely literary
texts published in that moment, including Charles Darwin’s The
Origin of Species, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, Charles Dickens’
Little Dorrit, Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Alfred
Tennyson’s The Idylls of the King, Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help, George
Eliot’s Adam Bede, Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, Edward
FitzGerald’s The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Mrs Beeton’s Book of
Household Management, John Ruskin’s Unto This Last, and Christina
Rossetti’s “Goblin Market.”  (Final selection of texts we’ll read
still to be determined.)  We will pursue and investigate a broad
range of ideas, approaches, and topics; we’ll be guided, however, by
a particular interest in the historicizing or historicist method, as
articulated in Jameson’s question.  What does it mean or tell us
that any of these texts were published in or around 1859?  What are
we doing when we read them in relation to that fact? An additional
aim of the course will be to conceptualize and theorize “the mid-
Victorian” as a (possibly) distinct period or era.

We will pursue various contextualizing possibilities for
understanding our readings, considering some of the major and minor
historical and cultural events of this moment, but we will also be
especially alert to the paradoxes and complications of attempting to
read texts “in the context” of any given event, phenomena, concept,
or year.  My hope is that our work together in this seminar will
lead us to productive insights not only about this set of texts, but
about historicist methodology in literary scholarship more
generally.  Our readings will therefore include, along with
scholarship on specific texts, work on literary history and the
historicist method by, in addition to some of those named above,
such theorists as Georg Lukacs, Raymond Williams, Walter Benjamin,
Catherine Gallagher, Dominic LaCapra, and Charles Altieri.

Assignments for the course will include several short response
papers, an annotated bibliography or review essay, and a final (20
pp. or so) seminar paper.  Dickens’ Little Dorrit is the probably
the longest text we will read; if you can, get started on it in the
Penguin edition over the holiday.  Please email me –
ikreilka@indiana.edu -- with any questions or concerns.