Spring 2000
ENGL 463 Jane Austen & Her World
Jane Austen completed six full-length novels: Northanger
Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield
Park, Emma and Persuasion (only four of these were published
in her own lifetime) These six novels are the center of our reading for this
course, but we shall also deal with Austen's earlier and unfinished works like Catharine,
Lady Susan, and Sanditon as well as the
shorter pieces found in her three manuscript notebooks. In reading
Austen, we will look at the world in which she lived, investigating matters
such as class, family life, marriage and courtship, public amusements and the
importance of centers like
We will also investigate reconstructions of "Jane
Austen's world" in 1990s television dramatizations and film versions of
her novels. What is their appeal for our time, and how are
they being interpreted? Are we still living in Jane Austen's world?
ENGL 553 Aesthetic
Theory/Enlightenment
This course is the study of a period and of what might be called both a mood and an ideology. (The
Enlightenment is arguably ultimately more like a club than "a
period"--some of us are still members.)
In a new age which was to get rid
of religious war and backward "superstition" and
"prejudice," fresh attention was paid not only to the pragmatic
observations of a new natural history but also to the social and cultural
world. Literature is full of " Observations"
and "Reflections;" we see such observation in texts like Voltaire's Lettres philosophiques
(Letters from England) and in
Philosophes were eager to
undertake the proper study of mankind, and to derive
from principled considerations the nature of human beings and of the ideal
political state. The new project--wittingly to create a new cultural
order--tends to emphasize education (in contrast to birth). The program of
change emphasizes the roles and decisions of young people, new entrants upon
the world (of whom the monster in Frankenstein, unhappy candidate for
educational experiment, is an extreme, perhaps parodic,
example). Any searcher for a new cultural order must take seriously the
problematic nature of generations, and the generations, of human sexuality and
sexual arrangements. Courtship and marriage are political and cultural issues,
as we see in a work like Rousseau's Julie.
Such a search for perfecting human life also entails a
detailed study of the human mind, and of what becomes known as "the
subject". What is the "individual," that center whence meaning
springs? And how can individuals be induced to unite?
The observation of the human mind can itself lead to some disturbing
conclusions, as we see in Locke's formative Essay concerning Human
Understanding.
Societies may seem monotonous, dogmatic and distorted (as in
Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Montesquieu's Lettres persanes,
or Voltaire's Candide). The individual mind
can also seem fragile and distorted, as in Tristram
Shandy. If we are all rational creatures, are we all alike? If we are alike, then we individually lack any
generative creative imagination, and life stays stuck. But
if we are all individuals (in Cartesian or Lockean
sense) then how can a social community be arrived at?
Our course on the Enlightenment will focus--as befits the
year 2000--on big questions. We will concentrate much of our attention on the
ways in which the Enlightenment reflects upon how human beings should relate to
each other. How do we relate to foreigners (to what we now call "the Other")? This is a problem not only for Guiliver but also for Fitzwilliam Darcy; responses differ
from Locke to Lessing. Is there a universal
"human nature"? How is it defined? What is
the "self"? How do codes of manners or rules of conduct operate--are
they prejudicial to the individual ? or can they be beneficial ? Answers come from quarters as
diverse as
Texts include Locke's Two Treatises
and his Essay concerning Human Understanding; Montesquieu's
Lettres persanes
(Persian Letters); Swift's Gulliver's Travels; Voltaire's Lettres philosophiques
and Candide; Rousseau's Julie, of la
Nouvelle Heloise (Julie or the New Eloise); Lord
Chesterfield's Letters (selections); Sterne's Tristram Shandy; Lessing's drama Nathan der
Weise (Nathan the Wise); Goethe's Die
Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther); Jefferson's Notes on the State Of
Virginia; Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
Fall 2001
ENGL 451 Seminar: Virtue, Sex,
and the Good Life: Eighteenth-Century Novels
How should I behave? Am I completely
independent -- or should I rely on the advice of others? Am I
defined by my birth — or do I make myself? If "Virtue" is a
guide, what exactly is "Virtue"? Is Virtue really
possible in a highly mobile society that values change and re-formation
above stability?
Such questions are implicitly-- and
explicitly-- asked in the English novels of the eighteenth century. In
Women’s "Virtue" consisted only in a demonstrable
chastity. In novellas by two women writers, Aphra Behn’s The Story of the Nun and Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina, we can see the complications that
arise when such a view is enforced. In Daniel Defoe’s Roxana, a wife
abandoned by her husband with five children and no income finds that she can
market herself. Indeed, she can apparently cast aside an old identity, change
her class, and acquire great wealth. How gravely "criminal" is her
action? Should she have starved instead? In contrast, the beautiful maidservant
who is the heroine of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela,
arguably the first novel about sexual harassment, tries to resist the
advances of her young master. Is she right to fend him off--or is she just
being conceited? Can "Virtue" ever exist without self-conceit and
self-consciousness?
Henry Fielding in Tom Jones, The
History of a Foundling, follows the fortunes of a male bastard who both is
and is not accepted by his adoptive world. How many sexual affairs can or
should a young man like Tom have he have? What does Virtue mean in relation to
the male life? Fielding, a lawyer, pursues throughout his narrative certain
abstract concepts like Honour, Prudence, and
Virtue--concepts often comically embodied in or enacted by his characters.
Horace Walpole in The Castle of Otranto
(
Throughout the eighteenth century, a variety of narrative
modes and freshly-developed new styles alert the
reader to possibilities and choices.
ENGL 553 The Stupendous, the Charming, the Grotesque and the Strange: A Second Look at the Aesthetics of Enlightenment
The period or movement we allude to in the term "Enlightenment"
arguably treats political, social and moral issues in terms of the aesthetic,
raising the value of the aesthetic and of art, and evoking new urgency in the
questions asked about aesthetic values. A complicated discourse about morals,
politics and ethics seems constantly to be performed
in terms of aesthetics. On the other hand, aesthetic values are
often confidently subsumed into the service of trade and commerce, thus
made vulgarly utilitarian and prefiguring our own advertising civilization. The
popularity of the "heritage" décor associated with current British
productions of "classics" like Pride and Prejudice testifies
to our own intimate association of eighteenth-century style and consumerism,
associations traceable within that period itself. The concept of
"fashion," like the concern with being fashionable (datable from the
reign of Louis XIV), is both admired and despised in the aesthetic discourse of
the eighteenth century
Concepts seem oddly mobile and uneasy. Sensuous appeal is
itself a problem, and persons and things (lovely young virgins, rural scenery,
for instance) that are officially associated with the Beautiful become
recalcitrant—as we see in
This course constitutes an examination of the Enlightenment
with concentration on specifically aesthetic texts from the dominance of French
neo-classic criticism to the advent of what is now known
as "Romanticism." Texts to be studied include Continental works1
such as Corneille’s Le Cid and his essays on
theatre, Boileau’s L’art
poétique, Rousseau’s Lettre
sur les spectacles, Lessing’s
Laokoön, parts of Kant’s Kritik
der Urteilskraft (in
English, Critique of Judgment) and Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften
(in English, Elective Affinities). We will also study major works by
British writers such as Addison’s Spectator papers on "The
Pleasures of the Imagination," Pope’s Rape of the Lock, Moral
Essays, and the Dunciad, Thomson’s The
Seasons (selections), Richardson’s Pamela, Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy,
Hume’s short essay "On Taste," Burke’s Enquiry concerning
the Sublime and the Beautiful and Austen’s Sense and Sensibility
(1 French and German
works will be offered in translation, but students are urged to employ their
foreign languages in grappling with the text in the original language, and the
original language text will be discussed in class, and not just the
translation.)
Spring 2002
ENGL 462Z Seminar:
Jane Austen & Her World
Jane Austen's novels constitute a corpus of comic works about love and
human relationships, a body of work regarded as "classic" yet
accessible. Sometimes seen as creating a timeless pastoral world of elegance,
she has also been commended as shrewd historian of
manners, morals and values in a period of immense change - literary, social and
economic.
Jane Austen, born at the beginning of the American War of
Independence, lived and wrote during a time of almost constant war. Her
too-short adult writing life is largely lived in the shadow of the Napoleonic
Wars. She produced six novels, which have been praised and
perhaps sometimes misframed as extremely elegant
stories of courtship among very refined people. Yet her earliest works
(not printed until the 20th century) show her hearty sense of humor, and a
taste for absurdity and violence which led the
admiring G. K. Chesterton to compare the Austen of these early works to
Rabelais. If we look at the six novels after examining the earlier works, we
may see more of conflict and a higher sense of the absurd than more decorous
versions of Austen have led us to expect.
Who is Jane Austen and what are her works
really like? Is she always saying the same things? Are all her moral
characters "good" in the same way, or does she contract herself -
after all, would Fanny Price really approve of Elizabeth Bennet?
What kinds of conflict is she best at representing? It is noticeable that there
was something of a "boom" in Austen during the last decade, with a
proliferation of versions of her stories in dramatized form in television
serials and movies. Why is this? What do we expect her to do for us? We admire Austen as the writer of comedy - but what do we mean by
the term "comedy"?
All of these are questions for us to pursue together as we
enjoy reading not only all six of the mature novels but also the early works
and unfinished novels such as "Catherine," "The Watsons," and "Sanditon."
Some copies of certain of Jane Austen's letters will be
supplied. As Jane Austen liked plays and was
influenced by comic drama, we will read (and act bits of)
Each student will be expected to
act as a member of a team producing a class report. Journals will
be kept, and the assignments will consist of the report, one quiz, two
essays, and a longer paper at the end of the semester.
TEXTS: Austen: Northanger Abbey, Sense and
Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice,
ENGL 466 Love &
the Novel
Love has been a constant subject of the novel since the time of early
Starting with the Symposium, a basic text on erotic and
other loves which reflects and helps to define ways in which we in the West
have thought about love, we move to two very distinct ancient novels, Longus' Daphnis and Chloe and Chariton's Chaireas and Kallirrhoe (written
in the 1 st-3rd centuries AD.). One is a story about
two very youthful pastoral lovers, the other, a story of a marriage based on
love and an unusual adultery. Both of these novels treat personal erotic love
in relation to the familial, social and natural order. We can compare the
appearance of Eros in Longus with the representation
of Amor in Dante's mixed genre story of a personal
encounter with Love. We will then inquire into the representations of Eros in
the Early Modern and modern periods, noting the treatment of it particularly in
fictions about relationships not --or not yet-- sanctioned by or subordinated
to religious precept, custom or the solidity of the state.
Characters in novels (like ourselves)
search for love, but their desires may be chaotic and the object forbidden. Is
adultery (as the critic Tony Tanner once suggested) central to fiction? Is desire for narrative intertwined with erotic desire? We
may think we like love, but we may not. Love, so often represented as a rose,
seems sometimes a kind of weed to be rooted out. Yet, as the novels
demonstrate, Eros refuses to be counted out of issues
of identity, and it slides into the heart of philosophical enquiries and
searches. Prose fiction represents love in multiple and disturbing aspects,
including its comic sides.
TEXTS: Plato, Symposium; Longus,
Daphnis and Chloe; Chariton, Chaireas and Kallirrhoe; Dante, La Vita Nuova;
Prevost, Manon Lescaut; Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of
Young Werther) and Wahlverwandtschafien
(Elective Affinities); Flaubert, Madame Bovary; C. Brontë,
Jane Eyre; Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray; Ford Madox
Ford, The Good Soldier; Murdoch, The Nice and the Good.
Fall 2002
ENGL
541 The Novel as an Agent of Change
The
course title is suggested by Elizabeth Eiesenstein‚s book title The Printing Press as an Agent
of Change. The Novel is often associated with the development of the
printing press. Ian Watt’s "Rise of the Novel" is associated with the
same period as that allotted to what we term "the Enlightenment".
This view of the history of the genre may well seem defective, once we look at
the novels of antiquity. It might be truer to say that the novel as a genre has
always served as a means of what we can call "enlightenment," at
various stages of its being. The Novel has recently been valued as a mirror of
history, dealing with the manners and practices of persons within a culture. But the Novel itself may be considered as "an Agent of
Change" not just a reflector of it. The Novel enacts the processes
(historical and psychological) of change and recognition. Novelistic anagnorisis (recognition, or coming to know in a new way) is not seeking
a stable ending (as in the oversimplified version of Aristotelian theatre) but
enacting a process in which, after every recognition, subsequent recognition
must be absorbed. The individual character has to interact with a multi-faceted
and changeful world, without being allowed the leisure
for lengthy abstract philosophical reflection. (Indeed, what that individual‚
may be is a novelistic subject in itself.) As Philip Sidney and others have
noted, fiction comes between history and philosophy, offering us something
different from either though related to both. Novels are also (unlike most
traditional works of history and philosophy) often penned by outsiders,
foreigners, women. If we want to know how and why we
think both personal and social change is possible, we should look first at the
Novel as the biggest and most pervasive cultural exemplar of both cultural and
personal metamorphosis.
We
shall start by examining three major novels of antiquity: Heliodorus‚
Aithiopika; Petronius‚
Satyricon; and Apuleius ‚ Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass or
Asinus aureus). We
shall then move to the Renaissance, pursuing the first two books of Rabelais‚
set of five (now compendiously termed Gargantua
and Pantagruel) and the first part of Cervantes‚
Don Quixote. Later texts include the following: Lafayette, The Princess
of Cleves (La Princesse
de Clèves); Swift, Gulliver’s Travels;
Richardson, Pamela, and sections of Sir Charles Grandison;
Graffigny, Letters of a Peruvian Woman (Lettres d’une Péruvienne); Scott, The Heart of Midlothian;
Gaskell, My Lady Ludlow, and Wives and Daughters.
Spring 2003
ENGL
450Z Seminar: Enlightenment Drama
What
happened to drama after Shakespeare died? This course will attempt to answer
that question. In the late 17th and 18th centuries, drama was the leading
medium of cultural expression. A
potential moneymaker for dramatists, the stage offered a mode not only of
reflecting but also of enlightening a society and affecting its behavior. No
wonder drama attracted strong support and great hostility! Throughout the
semester, we shall include in our view the influential Continental drama which directly affected the works of English
dramatists. European dramatists include Pierre Corneille,
Jean Racine, Molière, and Schiller.
This course has a special focus on "English" drama (in which Irish
authors excel). Changes such as advent of female actors on the English stage
during the 1660s, alterations in acting styles, and in the physical use of the
stage, will be noted in relation to the plays. We will investigate and try to imagine
successive new styles of spectacular production, and will follow developments
of comedy and tragedy in the works of the Restoration’s young dramatists like Behn, Wycherley, Congreve and
Dryden and in the new "sentimental" works of the early eighteenth
century, which redefine marriage and gender roles. Political satires and
historical plays were important, and fresh censorship had to be
confronted. Shakespeare the dramatist of course never "died"
and we will trace various ways of presenting his works - and rewriting them -
in various decades for contemporary audiences.
The latter part of the eighteenth century opens the stage to female
dramatists, and fresh points of view. The end of our period (c. 1800) sees the
development of the "Gothic" mode in drama (so familiar to us from the
movies).
The texts of plays are works for performance, and class members are expected to participate in enacted readings (sometimes
with props and costumes). There are no
spectators; everyone is to be a "performer" these in-class production
moments, which count as part of class participation.
Assignments: Two
short essay papers (3-5 pages; 5-8
pages) during the semester, and a longer paper (10 pages) at the end of the
semester. Students are expected
also to work in a team to present a class report on some particular aspect of
stage production.
ENGL
541 The Novel as an Agent of Change
The course
title is suggested by Elizabeth Eisenstein's book
title The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. The Novel and the
development of print are often connected. Ian Watt's "Rise of the
Novel" is associated with the same period as that allotted to what we term
"the Enlightenment." This view of the history of the genre may well
seem defective, once we look at the novels of antiquity. It might be truer to
say that the novel as a genre has always served as a means of what we can call
"enlightenment," at various stages of its being. The Novel has
recently been valued as a mirror of history, dealing with the manners and
practices of persons within a culture. But the Novel
itself may be considered as "an Agent of Change," not just a
reflector of it. The Novel enacts the processes (historical and psychological)
of change and recognition. Novelistic anagnorisis (recognition,
or coming to know in a new way) is not seeking a stable ending (as in the
oversimplified version of Aristotelian theatre) but enacting a process in
which, after every recognition, subsequent recognition must be absorbed. The
individual character has to interact with a multifaceted and changeful world,
without being allowed the leisure for lengthy abstract
philosophical reflection. (Indeed, what that individual may be is a novelistic
subject in itself.) As Philip Sidney and others have noted, fiction comes
between history and philosophy, offering us something different from either
though related to both. Novels are also (unlike most
traditional works of history and philosophy) often penned by outsiders,
foreigners, and women. If we want to know how and why we think both
personal and social change is possible, we should look first at the Novel as
the biggest and most pervasive cultural exemplar of both cultural and personal
metamorphosis.
We
shall start by examining three major novels of antiquity: Heliodorus,
Aithiopika; Petronius,
Satyricon; and Apuleius,
Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass or Asinus
aureus). We shall then move to the Renaissance,
pursuing the first two books of Rabelais' set of five (now compendiously termed
Gargantua and Pantagruel) and the first part of Cervantes
' Don Quixote. Later texts include the following: Lafayette, The
Princess of Cleves (La Princesse
de Clèves); Swift, Gulliver's Travels;
Richardson, Pamela
(and selected passages of Sir Charles Grandison);
Graffigny, Letters of a Peruvian Woman (Lettres d'une Péruvienne);
Scott, Old Mortality and The Heart of
Fall 2003
ENGL
462Z Seminar: Jane Austen & Her World
Jane
Austen's novels constitute a corpus of comic works about love and human
relationships, a body of work regarded as "classic" yet accessible.
Sometimes seen as creating a timeless pastoral world of elegance, she has also been commended as shrewd historian of manners,
morals and values in a period of immense change - literary, social and
economic.
Jane
Austen, born at the beginning of the American War of Independence, lived and
wrote during a time of almost constant war. Her too-short adult writing life is
largely lived in the shadow of the Napoleonic Wars. She produced six novels,
which have been praised and perhaps sometimes misframed as extremely elegant stories of courtship among
very refined people. Yet her earliest works (not printed until the 20th
century) show her hearty sense of humor, and a taste for absurdity and violence which led the admiring G. K. Chesterton to compare
the Austen of these early works to Rabelais. If we look at the six novels after
examining the earlier works, we may see more of conflict and a higher sense of
the absurd than more decorous versions of Austen have led us to expect.
Who is Jane Austen and what are her works really like? Is she
always saying the same things? Are all her moral characters "good" in
the same way, or does she contract herself - after all, would Fanny Price
really approve of Elizabeth Bennet? What kinds of
conflict is she best at representing? It is noticeable that there was something
of a "boom" in Austen during the last decade, with a proliferation of
versions of her stories in dramatized form in television serials and movies.
Why is this? What do we expect her to do for us? We admire Austen as the writer
of comedy - but
what do we mean by the term "comedy"?
All of
these are questions for us to pursue together as we enjoy reading not only all
six of the mature novels but also the early works and unfinished novels such as
"Catherine," "The Watsons," and
"Sanditon." Some copies of certain of Jane
Austen's letters will be supplied. As
Jane Austen liked plays and was influenced by comic drama, we will read (and
act bits of)
Each
student will be expected to act as a member of a team
producing a class report. Journals will be kept, and
the assignments will consist of the report, one quiz, two essays, and a longer
paper at the end of the semester.
TEXTS: Austen: Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and
Prejudice,