English 75b: The Victorian Novel
Spring 2017, T Th 2-3:20
Rabb 333
Professor: John Plotz ()
Office hours: Tuesday 12-2 Rabb 264 and by appt
Victorian love stories (The Warden), chronicles of bad marriages (Middlemarch) and adventure stores (Kim) are at once familiar and strange. The hidden desires and unspeakable loves that define the “other Victorians” in some ways seem part of an antique past, but the feelings and thoughts that Eliot, Dickens and others bring to light form an inescapable part of current ideas about privacy, sexuality, and class relations (yes, we have those in America, too). From The Wire to reality TV to every science fiction novel that steals its plot from H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine or The War of the Worlds, the Victorian legacy is hidden in plain sight.
The class asks how novels that were both popular entertainment and moral/spiritual guides in their own time reach us today. Victorian plots, their ideas about character and personality, and their models of sympathy and ethical responsibility resonate in not just contemporary films, but in fundamental notions of what defines a person, and what sorts of sympathy are possible between strangers or between intimates.
The central ideas we will explore include: the tension between romantic love and familial duty, the gap between individual experience and societal wisdom, the importance of individual character, the durability of class differences, the nature of both economic and spiritual impoverishment. We will also look at how these ideas get reframed and rethought in later texts, or in other art forms, including contemporary film.
Unless otherwise noted, all readings not available at the bookstore are on latte.
[all bracketed readings are recommended but not required]
Books: are available at the Brandeis bookstore but I am very happy for you to order them online instead, through Amazon, or Bookfinder.com or elsewhere. However, please obtain the particular edition listed below (ISBN numbers may sometimes vary slightly). This is partly so we can be on the same page in class discussion (a very important consideration), but there also crucial editorial decisions (and sometimes vital supplementary material) in these editions that will be important for our understanding of the books. No online reading of assigned novels; please purchase books so you can mark them up.
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (Oxford 978-0199219766)
Anthony Trollope The Warden (Oxford 019953778X)
George Eliot, Middlemarch (Norton 0393974529)
Elizabeth Gaskell Cranford (Oxford 0199538271)
Darwin, CharlesSelections (Norton 0393958493)
RL Stevenson Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Norton 0393974650)
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (Oxford, 019953702X)
Rudyard Kipling, Kim (Penguin 9780140183528)
HG Wells, Dover Reader (Dover, 0486802485)
Week 1-3 Introduction, Dickens……
Tuesday 1/17, Introduction: How do Novels Start?(handout also available online)
Thursday 1/19 Charles Dickens, Great ExpectationsVol. I chapters 1-9, pp. 1-66
Michael Warner, “Uncritical reading” focus on pp 13-20
(on Latte, like all subsequent reading)
“autobio. in books” due on latte by 10pm (ungraded); Monday 1/23
1/24 GE Vol. I chapters 10-19
“Sketches by Boz” (online); especially “Our next-door neighbor”
First Latte post due at 10 p.m. Wednesday 1/25
1/26GE all of Vol. 2; chapters 20-39 (147-297)
Catherine Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality” 336-351
Recommended only: [Ian Watt, from “Rise of the Novel”]]
Recommended only: [Roland Barthes, from Pleasures of the Text]]
1/31GE; vol. III chapters 1-10 (41-50)
Georg Simmel, “The Stranger” [and “Metropolis and Mental Life”]
[A. Garcha, from “From Sketch to Novel”]
[M. Lauster, from “Sketches of the Nineteenth Century”]
2/2 GE; vol. III chapters 11-20 (51-59) plus “original ending” (443-5)
Simon Eliot, “The Business of Victorian Publishing”
[Edgar Allen Poe, “Man of the Crowd”]
[2:45 visit to the archives to see magazines, volumes, and “numbers”]
Week 4: Trollope Liberalism, Personality
2/7Trollope : The Warden[chs. 1-10]; Woloch “Minor characters”
[[Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality (3-49)]]
[David Miller on Trollope: from Novel and the Police]
2/9The Warden[chs. 11-21]
[from Family Fortunes on middle-class professional identity]
[Elaine Hadley on Trollope, from Living Liberalism]
“archival puzzle” due
Week 5-6: Eliot, Middlemarch, The Novel-Wide Web, and Darwin
2/14George Eliot, Middlemarch Books 1-2, 3-144
First paper topic due on latte 10pm 2/15
2/16 MM Book 3, 144-200, Book 4, 201-266
Raymond Williams “Knowable communities” from The Country and the City
February break……
2/28MM, MM Books 5 and 6, pp. 267-393
Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect”
from Charles Darwin, Origin of Species (95-98, 111-135, 171-174, plus tbd)
[from James Buzard Disorienting Fiction (Introduction) [Latte]
3/2MM [make sure you are caught up with Middlemarch books 1-6]
Robert Browning, “Memorabilia” [plus others from Men and Women (on Latte)]
first paper due at 4 pm 3/2
3/7Middlemarch book 7, 395-451;
possible collaborative class on John Everett Millais
begin collaborative research project
3/9 MM book 8, 453-515Zadie Smith, “Middlemarch and Everybody”
[Rebecca Mead on reading MM young and old]
Week 7: Domestic Panics, and the “Feminine” Novel
3/14 Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford, 1-80, 161-179
3/16 Cranford, 80-160, Introduction(vii-xxv) [from Mill Subjection…]
Florence Nightingale, Cassandra;
[Margaret Oliphant, “Mr. Sandford”]
Week 8Terrors and Mysteries of London
3/21 R L Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde1-62
Franco Moretti, “The Slaughterhouse of Literature”
[Carlos Ginzburg,” Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes”]
3/23Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde75-102, 132-170 [plus film]
Charles Darwin, Descent of Man,ch 3, 213-222; ch 21, 243-254 plus TBD
Collaborative Research Project Due, group 1/2
Week 9-10: Sex and Decadence (political and poetic dissidents)
3/28 Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (Part First and Second, chs 1-18)
Collaborative Research Project Due, group 3
3/30Jude the Obscure(Part 3 and 4, ch, 19-35)
George Meredith Modern Love
[D. Rossetti, “House of Love”]
Monday night 4/3: final research paper Proposal due
4/4 Jude the Obscure (to end: Parts 5 and 6, chs 36-55)
Week 11: The Birth of Science Fiction
4/6 H.G. Wells, “The Time Machine”
Spring Break 4/10-4/18
latte post due 4/19
4/20 H.G. Wells, “The Time Machine” “The Country of the Blind” “The New Accelerator”“Plattner” etc TBD
Week 12/13: Kids Abroad: Juvenile visions of Imperial Britain
4/25 Rudyard Kipling, Kim 49-178, chs. 1-7 Macaulay, “Minute on Indian Education”
4/27 Kim, 179-278, chs 8-12; Final Paper workshop day
5/2 Kipling, Kim to end (plus Edward Said Introduction, 7-46)
Wednesday 5/3Final Paper due 4 pm
Course Expectations:
Latte Posts Each student, every week, will be posting a comment about your reading experiences. So this is a sort of a reading journal, but one that develops in interaction with your classmates’ contributions. This is due by Tuesday night at 10 pm (preferably earlier). Those responses will be ungraded, but you are expected to read all the postings for any given week. You must post one response each week: they form a significant part of your grade.
Papers: There are only two graded papers, one small “archival puzzle” and one collaborative research project; paper assignments will be distributed well in advance. I am happy to look at drafts on any assignment (including the long blog entry) so long as they are received by FIVE days before the assignment is due. (I will read and respond e-mailed drafts in Word, and respond electronically.)
- “archival puzzle”
- a short (5-7 pp) close-reading paper
- Collaborative research project (details tk)
- A longer final paper (8-10 pp):
Unless otherwise noted, all papers due in hard copy at 4 pm on the given day, in my box in the English department Rabb Hall 144.
Rewrites are welcome on most assignments, and I urge you to visit the Brandeis Writing Center in the Goldfarb Library for help at any time during the semester. Papers should be original explorations of the material presented in class. What I mainly hope to see is well structured arguments about issues raised in class, supported by careful close reading of the texts we have read together. A successful paper will involve clear exposition of your own ideas and a reliable account of the textual evidence that leads you to your inferences. I will return typed comments to you with every paper, and will happily respond to drafts handed in up to five days before a paper is due.
Grading:
Papers: 70 % (first 20%, collaboration 15%, second 35%)
Class Participation: 30%
(library assignment: 10%, weekly contributions: 10%; in-class participation: 10%)
[Unexcused absences and days without books will be factored in; three unexcused absences or more may result in a substantially lowered grade.]