Παρουσίαση/Προβολή
Nineteenth Century Anglophone Writing
(ENL639) - Χρυσή Μαρίνου
Περιγραφή Μαθήματος
Course Description:
The course explores the development of nineteenth century Anglophone fiction by British and American authors focusing on different genres such as the short story, journalistic writing, essay, novella, and novel. Emphasis is put on women’s writing and the variety of prose styles, while thematically the course focuses on the representations of the modern city, the presence/absence of women in the nineteenth century public sphere, stereotypes in travel writing, class distinctions and labour, the role of the object/commodity in literary works, and imperial politics. Students are offered the opportunity to concurrently explore the more theoretical essays of the selected authors and relevant critical scholarship. We will discuss the ways in which fiction reflects both the rapid social changes and the transforming views on gender, class, commodity culture, nation, imperialism, and civilization. Questions raised by the course include: What did the nineteenth century—with its particular social and economic conditions—bequeath to the study of literature? What does a literary work reveal about our understanding of the human subject and of the world? How does fiction reveal the multifarious factors that shape the characters’ identities and how they view the world?
Ημερομηνία δημιουργίας
Παρασκευή 1 Μαρτίου 2024
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Course Syllabus
Nineteenth Century Anglophone Writing/
Πεζογραφία του 19ου Αιώνα, ΛΕ 169, Εαρινό, 6ο Εξάμηνο, Επιλογής
Course Description:
The course explores the development of nineteenth century Anglophone fiction by British and American authors focusing on different genres such as the short story, journalistic writing, essay, novella, and novel. Emphasis is put on women’s writing and the variety of prose styles, while thematically the course focuses on the representations of the modern city, the presence/absence of women in the nineteenth century public sphere, stereotypes in travel writing, class distinctions and labour, the role of the object/commodity in literary works, and imperial politics. Students are offered the opportunity to concurrently explore the more theoretical essays of the selected authors and relevant critical scholarship. We will discuss the ways in which fiction reflects both the rapid social changes and the transforming views on gender, class, commodity culture, nation, imperialism, and civilization. Questions raised by the course include: What did the nineteenth century—with its particular social and economic conditions—bequeath to the study of literature? What does a literary work reveal about our understanding of the human subject and of the world? How does fiction reveal the multifarious factors that shape the characters’ identities and how they view the world? How does an author depict these factors in the concise form of the short story that by definition becomes a study in economy and style?
Course Objectives:
The course aims at:
—understanding and explaining what informs the production of fiction in the Victorian era; contextualising the text within its wider socio-economic frame.
— thinking critically about the intersection of British literature with historical and cultural
phenomena of the nineteenth century.
—employing methodological tools to critically read theoretical essays that discuss either the literary works under scrutiny or the nature and characteristics of the texts.
—exploring the nineteenth century literary past of fiction.—familiarising students with Internet resources on the nineteenth century literature and history.
Week by Week Syllabus
Week 1:
What is Realism? The Victorian Times
Friedrich Engels, “The Great Towns”. The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. New York: John W. Lovell Company, 1887. 17-50 (pdf).
Flint, Kate. (2012). “The Victorian Novel and its Readers”. The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel, 13–35 (pdf).
Nochlin, Linda. “The Nature of Realism.” Realism. London: Penguin Books, 1971. 13-56
Week 2:
The Crowd as hero of the Modern City: the Birth of the Flâneur
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man of the Crowd” (1840) [in pdf].
Listen to the story as narrated by Frank Landsman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5Xx8ulZNEg
Benjamin, Walter, and Michael William Jennings. The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Harvard University Press, 2006 [excerpts pp. 79-85, 186-190 in pdf].
Further Reading:
Bran, Nicol. “Reading and Not Reading ‘The Man of the Crowd:’ Poe, the City, and the Gothic Text.” Philological Quarterly 91.3 (2012): 465-493.
Week 3:
The Walking Observer and the City
Charles Dickens. “Arcadian London.” The Uncommercial Traveler (1861-8) [pp. 115-121 in pdf]
——. “Nightwalks.” The Uncommercial Traveler [pp. 93-98 in pdf]
Listen to the texts in the audiobook here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N9R1orGp9U
Further Reading:
Robinson, Brian. “Charles Dickens and London: The Visible and the Opaque.” Geo Journal 38. 1 (1996): 59–74. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41146704.
Keirstead, Christopher M. “Dickens, Travel Disorientation, and the Emergence of the Modern Literary Travel Essay: or, ‘A Flight’ (and ‘Night Walks’) on flight.” Studies in Travel Writing 19.4 (2015): 340-357, DOI: 10.1080/13645145.2015.1101897.
Week 4:
The Modern Travel Essay: the case of Greece
Mark Twain’s 1869 “Chapter XXXII” in The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims’ Progress; Being Some Account of the Steamship Quaker City’s Pleasure Excursion to Europe and the Holy Land; with descriptions of Countries, Nations, Incidents and Adventures, as They appeared to the Author (pp. 337-353 in pdf) and Edith Wharton’s The Cruise of the Vanadis (excerpts in pdf).
Further Reading:
AbuHilal Fatin. “The Construction of the ‘Self’ in Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad: 'The Positional Superiority' of the American Identity in the Nineteenth- century Travel Narrative.” International Journal of Comparative Literature & Translation Studies ISSN 2202-9451 2. 4: (2014): 15-26.
Week 5:
Victorian Women and the Public Sphere: the novel without a hero I
William Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848) [Chapters I- XV, pp. 1-170] and George Eliot, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” (1856) [both in pdf].
Watch Epic History TV’s blow-by-blow account of the entire Waterloo campaign in 14 minutes, with animated maps and artwork, plus rarely seen photographs of survivors of Napoleon's army: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDZGL1xsqzs
Browse: The Victorian Web features several articles on Thackeray and the contexts of Vanity Fair: http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/wmt/index.html
You might find the section on how currency values equate to modern values useful:
http://www.victorianweb.org/economics/wages.html
Listen to “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cx3bacrl-HQ.
Further Reading:
Capuano, Peter J. “At the Hands of Becky Sharp: (In)Visible Manipulation and Vanity Fair.”Victorians Institute Journal 38.1 (2008):167-191. DOI:10.5325/victinstj.36.1.0167
Week 6:
Victorian Women and the Public Sphere: the novel without a hero II
William Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848) [Chapters XVI-XXIV, pp. 171-269] and George Eliot, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” (1856) [both in pdf].
Browse: The Victorian Web features several articles on Thackeray and the contexts of Vanity Fair: http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/wmt/index.html
You might find the section on how currency values equate to modern values useful:
http://www.victorianweb.org/economics/wages.html
Listen to “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cx3bacrl-HQ.
Further Reading:
Dobson, Kit. “‘An Insuperable Repugnance to Hearing Vice Called by Its Proper Name’: Englishness, Gender, and the Performed Identities of Rebecca and Amelia in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.” Victorian Review 32. 2 (2006): 1–25. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27793597.
Week 7:
Victorian Women and the Public Sphere: the novel without a hero III
William Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848) [Chapters XXV—XXXV, pp. 270-422].
Browse: The Victorian Web features several articles on Thackeray and the contexts of Vanity Fair: http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/wmt/index.html
You might find the section on how currency values equate to modern values useful:
http://www.victorianweb.org/economics/wages.html
Further Reading:
Wiltse, Ed. “‘[T]He Shout of the Beef-Eating British’: Nation and Genre in ‘Vanity Fair.’” CEA Critic 67. 3, (2005): 41–64. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44377604. 20 Jan. 2024.
Payne, David. “The Pathos of Distance: Thackeray, Serialisation, and Vanity Fair.” The Reenchantment of Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, and Serialisation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 44-68.
Week 8:
Mid-Term Exam (60 mins).
Sexuality and Class Structure:
Thomas Hardy, “On the Western Circuit” (1891) read with the 1830 Petition signed by the Filles Publiques of Paris in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, “O, Prostitution, Gambling”. 489-515 (both in pdf).
Further Reading:
Al-Ajmi, Nada. “Women in Thomas Hardy’s ‘On the Western Circuit.’” The Hardy Society Journal 2. 2 (2006): 44–51. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45273576. 15 January 2024.
Ferguson, Trish. “Machinations versus Mechanization: Desire in Thomas Hardy’s ‘On the Western Circuit.’” FATHOM [Online], 5 (2018): 1-11. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/fathom/795.
Week 9:
The Problem of Representation: Class, Labour, Art and Authorship
Henry James, “The Real Thing” (1892) and “The Art of Fiction” (1884) in pdf form.
Listen to the story here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vh5E7wcsr4g.
Further Reading:
Burrows, Stuart. “Stereotyping Henry James.” The Henry James Review 23. 3 (2002): 255-264. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/hjr.2002.0017.
Whitsitt, Sam. “A Lesson in Reading: Henry James’s ‘The Real Thing’.” The Henry James Review 16.3 (1995): 304-314. doi:10.1353/hjr.1995.0036
Simon, Linda. “The Captured Self: Problems of Portraiture in Henry James’s ‘The Real Thing’”. LINQ Literature in North Queensland 40.1 (2013): 64-75. https://journals.jcu.edu.au/linq/article/view/12/9.
Week 10:
Emancipation and the Allure of the Commodity.
Kate Chopin, “A Pair of Silk Stockings” (1897) read and discussed with excerpt from Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich. “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Eds. Vincent B. Leitch et al. New York: Norton & Company, 2010. 663-671 (both in pdf).
——. “A Pair of Silk Stockings” (1897). https://www.katechopin.org/a-pair-of-silk-stockings/. 1-3. Web.
Browse: the website dedicated to Kate Chopin’s life and work and check out the categories: https://www.katechopin.org.
Listen to the story here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5yALuJ5yFA.
Further reading:
Joslin, Katherine. “Kate Chopin on Fashion in a Darwinian World”. The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin. Ed. Janet Beer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 73-86.
Taylor, Helen. “‘The perfume of the past.’ Kate Chopin and Post-Colonial New Orleans.” The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin. Ed. Janet Beer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 147-160.
Week 11:
Imperial Visions: Feminizing of the Colony I
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899) [Chapter I, pp. 1-49] read with Said, Edward W. “Two Visions in Heart of Darkness.” Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1994, 19-31 (both in pdf).
Listen to Conrad’s text here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wExK37zBmX8.
Further Reading:
Shaffer, Brian W. The Blinding Torch: Modern British Fiction and the Discourse of Civilization. Massachusetts: U of Massachusetts P, 1993.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. The Wellek Library Lectures Series. New York: Columbia UP, 2003.
Week 12:
Imperial Visions: Feminizing the Colony II
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899) [Chapter II and III, pp. 50-128] read with Said, Edward W. “Two Visions in Heart of Darkness.” Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1994, 19-31 [both in pdf].
Listen to Conrad’s novel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wExK37zBmX8.
Further Reading:
Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness.” The Massachusetts Review 8.4 (1977): 782-94.
Cole, Sarah. “Conradian Alienation and Imperial Intimacy.” Modern Fiction Studies 44. 2 (1998): 251-81.
Week 13:
Review of course material, Study questions for the final exam.
General Info
All primary and secondary material will be made available online through the e-class.
Requirements: Students are required to have read the material before each class. Active participation is both encouraged and expected.
Assessment and Credit: The final grade will be based on the students’ performance in the final exam or the mid-term and the final exam. The midterm exam will be taken in Week 8 and will cover Weeks 1-7. Students who decide to sit the mid-term exam will be asked to answer only one question at the final exam.
How to Read the Texts for this Course
Read actively. Write in the margin and don't just underline, annotate. Distinguish between ideas or arguments that authors emphasize and details that you can look up again later. Rather than aiming to reproduce the contents of the reading or the lecture, focus your notes on main points and key ideas or examples. Read different kinds of text differently. Secondary sources (and many tertiary sources, such as visuals or power point presentations) should be treated as pieces of academic writing.
Think about what the different parts of a text can tell you: titles, subtitles, even tables of contents reveal how an author sees a subject: what it includes, when it begins and ends, etc. These are choices, not truths. Other parts of the “scholarly apparatus” (acknowledgements, footnotes, etc.) tell you about the author’s sources, which scholars they agree /disagree with, which theories or methods they use, etc.
Learn to “read for the thesis:” train yourself to find an author’s point quickly rather than simply read an article from start to finish. Authors often state their arguments most clearly in introductions and conclusions; the middle parts of a work tend to provide the sources, analysis and interpretation on which the arguments rest.
Every author is making an argument. Even when an author does not state an obvious “thesis,” they are making an argument implicitly, if only by focusing on some events, dates, figures, types of source, or themes, and leaving others out.
Primary sources (in this case literary works) are the documents that survive from the period we are investigating. They must be read with close attention and an open mind. Simply establishing what a literary work is saying often requires careful work; language, idioms, spelling, typography, and stylistic conventions all change. Tone and irony can be hard to detect. Even seemingly familiar words and phrases may not have meant then what they now do.
Look things up. Dictionaries (regular, biographical, and historical), atlases, bibliographies, encyclopedias, and other reference works are there to help you decipher the texts.
Read “against the grain:” A source that is unhelpful or unreliable for answering one question may well be valuable for answering another. Beyond the literal meaning of a source lie assumptions that may be just as revealing. Most sources tell you more than they were intended to, as do their silences and omissions.
Every source is “biased” (including the instructor): Identifying a source’s bias or mixture of biases is an important preliminary task. But it is only a preliminary task. Merely pointing out bias is not the same as analyzing an author’s arguments, interpreting a source’s historical meaning, or assessing its value as evidence for a particular question about the past.
Bibliography
AbuHilal Fatin. “The Construction of the ‘Self’ in Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad: 'The Positional Superiority' of the American Identity in the Nineteenth- century Travel Narrative”, International Journal of Comparative Literature & Translation Studies ISSN 2202-9451 2. 4 (2014) 15-26.
Al-Ajmi, Nada. “Women in Thomas Hardy’s ‘On the Western Circuit.’” The Hardy Society Journal 2. 2 (2006): 44–51. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/45273576. Accessed 15 Jan. 2024.
Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” The Massachusetts Review 8.4 (1977): 782-94.
Benjamin, Walter, and Michael William Jennings. The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Harvard University Press, 2006.
Benjamin, Walter. “O, Prostitution, Gambling.” The Arcades Project. Harvard: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002. 489-515.
Bran, Nicol. “Reading and Not Reading ‘The Man of the Crowd’: Poe, the City, and the Gothic Text”. Philological Quarterly 91.3 (2012): 465-493.
Burrows, Stuart. “Stereotyping Henry James.” The Henry James Review 23. 3 (2002): 255-264. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/hjr.2002.0017.
Capuano, Peter J. “At the Hands of Becky Sharp: (In)Visible Manipulation and Vanity Fair.”Victorians Institute Journal 38.1 (2008):167-191. DOI:10.5325/victinstj.36.1.0167.
Chopin, Kate. “A Pair of Silk Stockings” (1897). https://www.katechopin.org/a-pair-of-silk-stockings/. 1-3. Web.
Cole, Sarah. “Conradian Alienation and Imperial Intimacy.” Modern Fiction Studies 44. 2 (1998): 251-81.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Web. https://www.ibiblio.org/ebooks/Conrad/Heart_Darkness.pdf
Dickens, Charles. “Arcadian London.” The Uncommercial Traveler. Web-Books.Com. 115-121.
——. “Nightwalks.” The Uncommercial Traveler. Web-Books.Com. 93-98
Dobson, Kit. “‘An Insuperable Repugnance to Hearing Vice Called by Its Proper Name’: Englishness, Gender, and the Performed Identities of Rebecca and Amelia in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.” Victorian Review 32. 2 (2006): 1–25. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27793597.
Eliot, George. “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.” Westminster Review, vol. LXVI, October 1856, pp 442-461. George Eliot Archive.
Engels, Friedrich. “The Great Towns”. The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. New York: John W. Lovell Company, 1887. 17-50.
Ferguson, Trish. “Machinations versus Mechanization: Desire in Thomas Hardy’s “On the Western Circuit.”” FATHOM [Online], 5 (2018): 1-11. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/fathom/795.
Flint, Kate. “The Victorian Novel and its Readers”. The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel. Ed. Deirdre David. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 13-35.
Hardy, Thomas. “On the Western Circuit.” Web. 1-9. http://faculty.mercer.edu/glance_jc/english_264_online/resources/eng264_files/hardy_western_circuit.pdf
James, Henry. “The Real Thing”. The Real Thing and Other Tales. London: Macmillan and Co.,1893. 1-18.
Joslin, Katherine. “Kate Chopin on Fashion in a Darwinian World”. The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin. Ed. Janet Beer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 73-86.
Keirstead, Christopher M. “Dickens, Travel Disorientation, and the Emergence of the Modern Literary Travel Essay: or, ‘A Flight’ (and ‘Night Walks’) on flight.” Studies in Travel Writing 19.4 (2015): 340-357, DOI: 10.1080/13645145.2015.1101897.
Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich. “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof”. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Eds. Vincent B. Leitch et al. New York: Norton & Company, 2010. 663-671.
Payne, David. “The Pathos of Distance: Thackeray, Serialisation, and Vanity Fair.” The Reenchantment of Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, and Serialisation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 44-68.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Man of the Crowd”. Web. 1-5. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Tales%2520(Poe)/The%2520Man%2520of%2520the%2520Crowd?oldid=1916434.
Robinson, Brian. “Charles Dickens and London: The Visible and the Opaque.” Geo Journal 38. 1 (1996): 59–74. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41146704.
Said, Edward W. “Two Visions in Heart of Darkness.” Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1994. 19-31.
Shaffer, Brian W. The Blinding Torch: Modern British Fiction and the Discourse of Civilization. Massachusetts: U of Massachusetts P, 1993.
Simon, Linda. “The Captured Self: Problems of Portraiture in Henry James’s ‘The Real Thing’”. LINQ Literature in North Queensland 40.1 (2013): 64-75. https://journals.jcu.edu.au/linq/article/view/12/9.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. The Wellek Library Lectures Series. New York: Columbia UP, 2003.
Taylor, Helen. “‘The perfume of the past’. Kate Chopin and Post-Colonial New Orleans”. The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin. Ed. Janet Beer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 147-160.
Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair. New York: P.F. Collier & Son Company, 1917.
Twain Mark (Samuel L. Clemens). 1869. The Innocents abroad, or The New Pilgrims’ Progress; Being Some Account of the Steamship Quaker City’s Pleasure Excursion to Europe and the Holy Land; with descriptions of Countries, Nations, Incidents and Adventures, as They appeared to the Author. San Fransisco: H. H. Bancroft and Company.
Wharton Edith. The Cruise of the Vanadis. New York: Rizzoli, 2004.
Whitsitt, Sam. “A Lesson in Reading: Henry James’s ‘The Real Thing’.” The Henry James Review 16.3 (1995): 304-314. doi:10.1353/hjr.1995.0036.
Wiltse, Ed. “‘[T]He Shout of the Beef-Eating British’: Nation and Genre in ‘Vanity Fair.’” CEA Critic 67. 3, (2005): 41–64. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44377604. 20 Jan. 2024.