350:524

Index # - 13307

Distribution Requirement:  A4, B

Monday – 1:10 p.m.

MU 207

Jonah Siegel

The Critical Nineteenth Century

“It is to criticism that the future belongs”

“There was never a time when Criticism was more needed than it is now.”

                            Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist” (1891)

The critical importance of the nineteenth century is manifested as much when the period is evoked to provide the contrast necessary for the claims of novelty of later periods, as when it is identified as the source of important contemporary developments. Described sometimes as analogous to our own times, sometimes as entirely distinct, as belated, or always anticipating later developments—it is little wonder that, starting in the nineteenth century itself, a rich and varied critical literature developed out of the attempt to make sense of the literature and culture of the day.

This course is in the first instance an introduction to the critical conversations that have dominated study of the nineteenth century for the last fifty years. It will also touch on some of the rich and influential cultural analyses produced in the era itself.  The practical aim of the course is to provide the tools for informed work in the period, but it will be as important to us to engage the methodological and critical developments at issue in influential critical works.  In that way, the course will also be a study of how critical arguments are formed and gain authority, and how the image of an era is made and remade by the words of the critics.  The conceptual and methodological concerns of the course are intended to make it of use to students outside the period, who may focus on theoretical issues or on the significance of the critics in their own day.

Reading will include material from among the following volumes: M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (1953); Raymond Williams, Culture and Society  (1958) and The Country and the City (1973), E.P. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class (1963);  Edward Said, Orientalism (1978); Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic (1979); Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot (1984); Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction (1985); D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (1988); Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body (1995); Eve Sedgwick, Between Men (1985) and Epistemologies of the Closet (1990); Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry (1993).

From the nineteenth century we will read brief selections from William Hazlitt, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Pater, and Oscar Wilde, as well as a few influential continental thinkers.

Students will present both on the primary texts being discussed and on the theoretical or methodological projects shaping the critical works. As this course will cover period and theory requirements, individual student work will be designed to accommodate either emphasis

Requirements: Two papers, weekly response papers, class presentations. 

.