350:641

Index # - 13314

Distribution Requirement:  A4

Tuesday – 1:10 p.m.

MU 207

David Kurnick

George Eliot

This course will have three main goals: first, to introduce students to a central figure in nineteenth-century literature. Because of Eliot’s centrality to the history of the modern novel, her standing as perhaps the single most intellectually engaged of the big Victorian novelists, and the current centrality of her work in reevaluations of cosmopolitanism, nationalism, liberalism, religion, science, and governance (just to name a few) should make an in-depth exploration of her work useful to students focusing on other periods and literatures.

Second goal: to use Eliot as a figure to introduce students to current areas of research in nineteenth-century studies. Eliot is still the unavoidable touchstone in Victorian cultural studies, and the course will introduce students to the most contentious debates in the field. Holding a single figure in view over the course of the term will also give us the opportunity to evaluate the series of critical schools for which Eliot has been central: deconstruction, social criticism, Foucauldian and Marxist critique, feminism, ethical criticism, and postcolonialism, among others.

Thirdly, I want course participants to reflect on the strengths and limitations of author-based studies—to think about the career as a unit of analysis, about the eclipse of biography in recent work, and about the possibility of using biography other than naively as a critical tool. Our focus will permit us not only to read deeply in one author, but also to read “around” her—excerpts from Comte, Spencer and Lewes, as well as examining the issues of the Westminster Review Eliot edited.

Eliot texts:

Scenes of Clerical Life

Adam Bede

The Mill on the Floss

Felix Holt

Middlemarch

Daniel Deronda

“The Lifted Veil”

“Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”

 “The Natural History of German Life”

“Notes on Form in Art”

GE’s translation of Feurbach’s Essence of Christianity (excerpts)

Course Pack (articles and excerpts):

Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of  

    Detachment

Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”

Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and

    Nineteenth-Century Fiction

James Buzard: Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century

    British Novels

David Carroll, George Eliot and the Conflict of Interpretations

Cynthia Chase: “The Decomposition of the Elephants: Double-Reading Daniel Deronda”

Auguste Comte, Introduction to Positive Philosophy

Daniel Cottom, Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation

Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?”

Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction 1832-1867

_________. The  Body Economic: Life, Death and Sensation in Political Economy and the

     Victorian Novel

Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: the Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-  

     Century Literary Imagination

Neil Hertz, George Eliot’s Pulse

Henry James, “Daniel Deronda: A Conversation”

_________. “The Novels of George Eliot”

George Levine, Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian Fiction

G.H. Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind

D.A. Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel

J. Hillis Miller, “Optic and Semiotic in Middlemarch”

Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture

Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot

Bruce Robbins, “The Sweatshop Sublime”

Bernard Semmel, George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance

Leslie Stephen, George Eliot

Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780-1950

Virginia Woolf, “George Eliot”

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