Course Description
The Victorian era was a period fascinated by and committed to acts of preservation. Publications on geological time and evolutionary science like Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology and Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species made acutely palpable the threats of mortality and ephemerality. The rise of material culture, the expansion of the British Empire, and the importation of goods from around the globe meant that Victorians—well, wealthy Victorians—had more and more stuff to store. In this course, we will consider Victorian literature as intertwined with the nineteenth century’s many efforts at preservation.
We will begin by considering arguably the most famous of Victorian storage spaces—the attic—in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. We will consider storage’s role in concealment and the implications of keeping things like mental illness and the sins of empire “tucked away.” Themes of Victorian education in Jane Eyre will provide a transition to our course’s next section on “brain storage,” memorization, and the Victorian schoolroom. We move then to Victorian antiquarianism and attempts to store “dying” cultures, most specifically the oral culture and dialect of England’s Lancashire. Dialect poets’ attempted to capture the sounds and songs “of the people.” We will look at this attempt to store sound in our next unit as well, through our study of the phonograph and other nineteenth-century technologies designed to store sound and image. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, chock full of information storage technologies, will also transition us into our course’s final unit on post-mortem embalming and corpses.
This course examines novels and poems—themselves storage technologies of a kind—as both examples and insights into what Jonathan Sterne calls the era’s “ethos of preservation.” I hope, however, that this capacious theme will allow us to explore many aspects of Victorian history and culture: imperialism, Victorian education, Chartism and the working classes, gender roles and expectations, religion and doubt, Victorian medievalism, and more. Our readings, assignments, essays, and discussions aim to scavenge the stores of Victorian history and culture, and perhaps discover what of the nineteenth century we find still preserved in our lives and experiences.
REQUIRED COURSE TEXTS:
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. (Penguin Classics)
Hughes, Thomas. Tom Brown’s Schooldays. (Oxford World’s Classics)
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. (Penguin Classics)
Electronic copies of all other readings will be linked or distributed through our course website. You will be expected to print off and mark up all electronic copies or, if you really do prefer to read electronically, use a note-taking application.
GRADING
Final Grade Percentages
10% Victorian Pack Rat Project
15% Close Reading Paper
20% Final Research Paper
15% “My Attic” Entries
20% Final Exam
20% Participation and Preparedness
Accessing Grades:
Grades for major assignments will be posted on ICON under “Grades” approximately two weeks after the due date. Your participation grade and your grades on informal assignments will be posted at the end of the semester.
If you have a question or concern about a grade on a particular assignment, please observe the 24/7 rule: wait 24 hours to contact me about the assignment, but do not contact me after 7 days after I returned the assignment with a final grade.
Grading Rationale:
Final grades will be determined on the University’s A-F grade scale, with A as the highest possible grade.
A: To earn an A in this course, you must excel consistently, producing polished, well-crafted work that demonstrates mastery of new techniques and skills. You must use the revision process strategically to shape your work for your audience and take an active thoughtful leadership role in the classroom.
B: To earn a B, you must exceed all of the requirements of a C by producing proficient work that shows good evidence of revision and attention to audience considerations. You must be an active and constructive participate in the classroom and complete all activities thoroughly and with care.
C: Earning a C in this course signifies an average performance. To receive a C, you must produce competent, college-level work, completing all projects satisfactorily and on time, contributing positively to the classroom environment, giving basic attention to revision, and showing improvement.
D or lower: Earning a D or lower indicates that you have not shown consistent effort, have not met the minimum class standards in some way, or have hurt your grade by plagiarizing, not turning in work, or failing to participate.