2016-2017

As biological explanations of consciousness began to supplant belief in an immaterial soul, people living in the Victorian era were left with nothing but their bodies as the source of their thoughts and feelings. Can we use a historicized notion of the body to account for “character” in the Victorian novel? How does the extraordinary prevalence of death in this fiction sharpen our sense of the thinking body, and why does this rationalized body come with so much Gothic potential? (B, G)

This course explores the emergence of the documentary as a literary form in Depression-era America. We will address a wide spectrum of texts that self-consciously navigate tensions between reality and its representations; authors include Jon Dos Passos, Muriel Rukeyser, James Agee, Charles Reznikoff, and Richard Wright. (G)

This course will introduce students to questions and problems central to postcolonial literary studies. Through novels and theoretical pieces it will explore postcolonialism’s commitment to questioning dominant narratives of knowledge, versions of history, forms of identity and attachment, and versions of modernity centered on the nation. It will also explore experiences of diaspora and migration. (B, H)

This course explores the genre of nonsense literature from its Victorian incarnations to the present in authors such as Lewis Carroll, Gertrude Stein, and Angela Carter. We will look at the linguistic, aesthetic, and philosophical aspects of nonsense, but also the situations that provoke nonsense as a response to something overwhelming and incomprehensible. (B, G, H)

The Romantic period is a moment of convergence between politics and literature, in which piracy and pornography both played a key role. This course will consider what new insights into Romanticism can be gained through consideration of print culture, reading publics, and the political struggle for a free press. (C, F)

As Britain emerged as an imperial power, the concomitant rise of archaeology injected into British culture a series of alternative antiquities: Greek, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Indian, Celtic. In this course, we will look at some of the ways these various usable pasts were taken up in nineteenth-century English poetry, fiction, art and institutions, and used to imaginarily channel and refract political, social, and sexual anxieties and desires. Topics may include the Elgin Marbles controversy; Egyptomania; the excavations of Pompeii, Nineveh, and Stonehenge; decadence; the looting of the Old Summer Palace in Beijing; and the archaeologist as spy Readings may include Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn; Shelley’s Ozymandias; Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King; T.E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell; and Agatha Christie’s Murder in Mesopotamia. We will probably take field trips to Stonehenge and to the British Museum. (C, F)

This course, part of the London program, will provide you with a framework for developing a quarter-long research project, enriched by either archival work or fieldwork, that examines some object or aspect of London's cultural past. We will explore the city via a selection of literary and theoretical texts, and through a series of field trips that reflect London's historical economies of circulation. Course readings and discussion are designed to help you contextualize your objects, which need not be textual, within broader accounts of cultural production; topics may include patronage structures, print culture, and media theory. (H)

In 1956, British elites reluctantly confronted the end of Empire, while ordinary Britons were more concerned about contradictions between promises of affluence and the actual experience of austerity. Also in 1956, a new theatre opened in the as-yet unfashionable frontier of London’s theatre district; the Royal Court saw itself as a vanguard breaking class and gender taboos. These two currents converged in The Entertainer (1957), John Osborne’s play about the post-imperial moment in Britain We will use this play, its film version, and the theatre and its personnel (including Laurence Olivier who later ran the National Theatre) as a point of departure for studying the dramatic representation of history and urban life in key London sites, including the National’s opening state of the nation play, Weapons of Happiness (1976). The first two weeks of the course also include analyzing current productions at both theatres, along with critical texts on the impact of theatre (on tourism and gentrification, for instance). The third week, depending on shows on offer in 2016, may include one of several other theatres connected to the state of the nation and its transnational inheritance. (D)

Over the last two centuries, London has undergone two “revolutions,” the industrial revolution and the financialization revolution, both of which have had significant impacts on the built landscape and residential patterns of its neighborhoods. In the nineteenth century, London was not necessarily the locus of the industrial revolution that transformed the United Kingdom in uneven ways, but was nonetheless profoundly affected by it. Most notably, the size of London was one million in 1801 but increased to 6.7million by 1901, with associated impacts on the urban environment. And over the past three decades, in part through intentional interventions by national and city government, London has become a major world financial center, arguably becoming one of the “global cities” that the sociologist Saskia Sassen has described. This, too, has ushered in significant changes in the lived textures of London, altering the horizons of the City of London and the East End in particular. With these two events as frame, we will explore a variety of literary texts that concentrate on specific regions, neighborhoods, and even streets that have registered these forces in detectable ways. We will explore, in particular, the concept of gentrification, consider its efficacy as an explanatory device, even as we remain primarily dedicated to thinking about how literary works seek to depict these large-scale transformations. Some of the texts we might read are Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, George Gissing’s The Netherworld, Mike Leigh’s High Hopes, John Lanchester’s Capital, among other supporting texts (Sassen, the poverty maps of Michael Booth). Our study will be supported by guided walks through some of the more notable neighborhoods touched by the effects of industrialization and financialization. (B, G, H)

How do cultural products facilitate, abet, and enable the form of social ordering that we call policing? This course will explore the policing function of what modernity calls “culture” by exploring the parallel histories of policing, the emergence of modern police theory, and the rise of the novel. We will focus in particular on how both literature and the police emerge to navigate a series of linked epistemological and political problematics: the relation between particularity and abstraction, the relation between deviance and normalcy, and indeed that of authority as such. While we will focus on texts from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic world, students with a broader interest in policing are encouraged to enroll. Readings will include Daniel Defoe, Patrick Colquhoun, Henry Fielding, G.W.F. Hegel, Jane Austen, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, D.A. Miller, Michael McKeon, Mary Poovey, and Mark Neocleous. (B, F, H)