Instructor: Professor Landow (office: 338 Carr House; e-mail: george@landow.com); office hours: 1-2:00, Wednesday. Class meets 3.00-5:20 AM, Mondays in room 218, 70 Brown Street. Classweb: Victorian Web
E-Resources and weekly writing assignmemts
Week 1 (27-29 January) — Introduction to the Course: Victorians and Neo-Victorians
Week 2 (1-5 February) — The Madwomen in the Attic, the Maniac in the Cellar
Reading: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre [Sitemap — Full text in VW — Discussion questions by undergraduates) ]
Week 3 (8-12 February) A Gendered Postcolonial Response
Reading: Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea [sitemap]
Week 4 (15-19 February) Information Technology as Fantasy
Reading:Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair
Week 5 (24 through 28 February) Very great expectations.
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations [Full text (outside this site) — sitemap]
Week 6 (1-5 March) — Postcolonial Neo-Victorianism, or the Aussies write back
Reading Peter Carey, Jack Maggs [sitemap]
Week 7 (8-12 March) Postimperial Neo-Victorianism, or what's what wrong with empires
Reading: Graham Swift, Waterland [sitemap]
Week 8 (15-19 March) — A Victorian Novel Poem as a Kunstlerroman
Reading: Elizebth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh. [sitemap]
Week 9 (22 -28 April). The Joys of Scholarship.
Reading: A. S. Byatt, Possession [sitemap]
[Spring recess 27 March-4 April]
Week 10 (5-9 April) — The Victorian Sensation Novel
Reading: Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White [sitemap]
Week 11 (12-23 April) — The Gendered Neo-Victorian Sensation Novel
Reading: Sarah Waters, Fingersmith
Week 12 (26-30 April). — Nineteenth-century Monsters
Reading: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.
Week 13 (27 April-1 May). Twentieth-century Monsters
Reading: Shelley Jackson, Patchwork Girl [[sitemap] and My Body. Landow, Hypertext 3.0, pp. 1-9, 29-40, 144-48, 215-241.
Weekly discussion questions
These reading and discussion question have several required parts:
- Choose a substantial passage of 1-3 paragraphs or stanzas when discussing a literary text.
- Create a graceful and effective introduction to the material you chose that suggests why the reader should want to follow you as you examine it closely.
- Follow the quoted passage with at least one paragraph of commentary.
- Ask 4-5 questions, chiefly concerning matters of technique and comparison to other works, for which you do not have to have answers. As the semester progresses at least one question should involve a comparison of the painting or poem or other text you discuss with one read in a previous week.
- Provide a title for your question set and include your expected graduating class.
These exercises, which provide the basis of class discussion, should generally be e-mailed to me no later than 6 pm Sunday before we begin discussing the reading.
Last modified 31 January 2010