Undergraduate
English 467: Progress and Its Discontents in Late-Victorian Literature
The end of the nineteenth century (known as the “fin de siècle”) was an era that highlighted--often with ambivalence–social transformations, industrial and technological progress, and scientific evolution. One of the most famous figures of these changing times was the so-called “New Woman.” Riding bicycles, smoking cigars, pursuing careers, establishing clubs of their own, and marching for the vote, these imaginary “new women” and their real-life counterparts rebelled against conventional expectations that women should be devoted to the private sphere of the home, and that marriage and motherhood should be the crowning glory of their lives. This course examines notions of change through literary forms in late-Victorian culture. Given the importance of the city as a site for progress and its discontents, our readings will often center on London. We'll examine the roles of sexuality, class, work, science, imperialism, urban culture, crime and detection, through a variety of literary forms and theories including Aestheticism and Decadence, realism, romance, utopian and dystopian narratives, poetry, and essays. (Fall 2006)
English 461 (cross-listed with History of Science 350):
Victorian Literature, Science, and Culture
This course investigates narratives of transformation and evolution from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), through Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), to Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), in the broader context of nineteenth-century British culture. We will explore the interactions, similarities and differences among scientific, literary, and popular renderings of change over time and space (including those in scientific texts, novels, poems, magazine essays, and cartoons). At the level of form, we will consider the similarities and differences in scientific and literary genres with regard to openings, development, and modes of closure, and we will explore these issues in evolutionary theory itself, expressed as concerns over origins, transformation, and ends or goals. Delving more deeply into questions of what counts as “natural,” we will examine the problems of taxonomic organization, hierarchy, mixing, degeneration, monstrosity, and the supernatural, as they were produced in different genres. We will study debates accented by theories that unsettled or fixed boundaries between species, sexes, and races. This course also investigates the nature of interdisciplinary work by asking what kind of evidence--that crucial “missing link”--counts when drawing different discourses into dialogue. At the deepest level, we wish students to arrive at a fundamental appreciation of the unities and disparities of Victorian culture, the common context of literary, scientific, and social thought. (Fall 2006)
English 570: Gender, Place, Space, and Travel
This course approaches innovations in English, American, and Anglophone fiction and life-writing by and about women over the last century through the intertwined concepts of space, place, and travel. We will consider gendered identities in relation to a variety of spaces and places (public, private, urban, rural, communal, domestic, foreign, interior, exterior, colonial, postcolonial, national). The course is especially interested in "in-between" spaces and displacements, phenomena theorized by many concepts including heterotopia, flânerie, third space, homeland, diaspora, spatial practice, and situated knowledge. We will explore some recent theoretical perspectives on this topic, as well as various narrative strategies writers employ to imagine "border zones" and "roomspaces" of the in-between. The course includes an array of written assignments to explore multiple ideas of gendered spaces. (offered Spring 2005)
English 468: Victorian Women Writers
This course explores three Victorian women writers: Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), and George Eliot (1819-1880). For each author, we will read different texts by them to represent the arc of their careers, and we will also read representations of them by other writers including Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Gaskell, as well as more recent scholars. Part of the focus of this course is to examine ideas of gendered authorship in the Victorian period and beyond, and for this we will read theory (Michel Foucault's "What is an Author?") and feminist criticism. We will explore the concept of "promiscuous identification," or the pleasures and perils of identifying authors with characters, or novels with "real life." This is a Writing Fellows Course, and there will be a variety of writing assignments. (offered Spring 2005)
(rev. 9/2006)
