British Literature and the Brontës - Study Abroad

LISS1002 British Literature and the Brontës
Module Outline
Leeds International Summer School 2012
Module Leader: Dr. Alice Crossley
a.c.crossley@leeds.ac.uk
Module Description:
Assessment for this module will be ongoing and cumulative. The first week will involve lots of group
discussion, a group presentation, and a piece of written work for which students will receive an
assessed mark. The written work will take the form of an essay or a close reading. The following
week, when we concentrate on the Brontës, the assessed work will take the form of an individual
presentation, again supported by class discussion. The essay will be worth 50% and the
presentations 25% each of the total grade.
Monday 16 th July: Introduction to British literature
Lecture followed by discussion and quiz.
Tour of Brotherton library.
Questions:
What pre-conceptions might we have of British Literature?
Why does this course focus on the nineteenth century? What sorts of literature does
it offer modern readers?
What changes were happening in the literary and publishing worlds of the nineteenth
century?
Tuesday 17 th July: Dickens & Thackeray
Reading excerpts in class.
Discussion of style, political agenda, social context.
Excerpts from Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, an essay from Household Words and an essay
from The Roundabout Papers.
Questions:
What is persuasive about Dickens‟s writing?
What rhetorical tools do both writers use and to what effects?
How might we compare Dickens‟s fictional work with his non-fiction essays?
What similarities might we see in the work by Dickens and Thackeray?
Suggested further reading:
Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (1990)
John Bowen, Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit (2000)
John Carey, The Violent Effigy (1991)
Philip Collins, Dickens and Education (1963)
Mark Cronin, „Henry Gowan, William Makepeace Thackeray, and the “Dignity of Literature”
Controversy‟, Dickens Quarterly 16:2 (1999), 104-15
Judith L. Fisher, Thackeray’s Skeptical Narrative and the ‘Perilous Trade’ of Authorship (2002)
Holly Furneaux, Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities (2009)
Juliet John, Dickens’ Villains: Melodrama, Character and Popular Culture (2001)
John O. Jordan, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens (2001)
Lyn Pykett, Charles Dickens (2002)
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Wednesday 18 th July: Pre-Raphaelites and Poetry
Discussion of the aims and agenda of Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood with reference toThe Germ
(available as hypertext online).
Reading and discussion of poems by D.G. Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, and A.C. Swinburne.
Trip to the Leeds City Art Gallery with particular focus on the Pre-Raphaelite painting held there
(time permitting).
Questions:
What were the aims of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood?
How might we define their success or failure with regards to these aims?
In what ways might we compare painterly strategies with poetic ones?
Is it significant that the PRB was an all male group?
Is it useful to consider Swinburne in relation to the Pre-Raphaelites?
Suggested further reading:
Tim Barringer, Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (1999)
Andrew Belsey and Catherine Belsey, „Christina Rossetti: Sister to the Brotherhood‟,Textual
Practice, 2:1 (1988), 30-50
Joseph Bristow, ed., Victorian Women Poets: Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina
Rossetti (1995)
Alison Chapman, The Afterlife of Christina Rossetti (2000)
Deborah Cherry, Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (1993)
Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (2000)
Ellen Harding, ed., Re-framing the Pre-Raphaelites: Historical and Theoretical Essays (1996)
Antony H. Harrison, Victorian Poets and Romantic Poems: Intertextuality and Ideology (1990)
Jerome McGann, Swinburne: An Experiment in Criticism (1972)
Lynne Pearce, Woman/Image/Text: Readings in Pres-Raphaelite Art and Literature (1991)
Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (2000)
Herbert Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in EarlyVictorian
Literature and Art (1995)
Thursday 19 th July: Oscar Wilde
Group Poster Presentations.
Reading of The Importance of Being Earnest.
Questions:
How fluid is morality in Wilde‟s plays?
Who plays the role of the dandy and what does that role bring to the plays?
How and why are Wilde‟s plays comic?
How does Wilde configure relationships between the sexes and between the
generations in his plays?
Suggested further reading:
James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood (Ithaca and New York:
Cornell University Press, 1995)
Patricia F. Behrendt, Oscar Wilde: Eros and Aesthetics (1991)
Joseph Bristow, „Dowdies and Dandies: Oscar Wilde's Refashioning of Society Comedy‟, Modern
Drama 37:1 (1994): 53-70.
Karl Beckson, ed., Oscar Wilde: the Critical Heritage (1970)
Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (1987)
Sos Eltis, Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde (1996)
Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Market place: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (1986)
Josephine Guy and Ian Small, Oscar Wilde’s Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the
Late Nineteenth Century (2000)
Norbert Kohl, Oscar Wilde: the Works of a Conformist Rebel (1989)
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Kerry Powell, Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s (1990)
Frederick S. Roden, ed., Palgrave Advances in Oscar Wilde Studies (2005)
Peter Raby, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde (1997)
Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment (1994)
John Stokes, Oscar Wilde: Myths, Miracles and Imitations (1996)
Friday 20th: Field Trip to Haworth and the Brontë Parsonage (inc. walk on the Moors)
Week 1 assessment:
A. 1 st Assessment: Group Presentation (25%)
The assessment for the second week will be through a group poster presentation given on Day 4,
on any text or issue raised in seminars or in preparatory research related to days 1-4 of the module.
This will be set up on Day 1 when the module is introduced. There will be some class time devoted
to preparation for this task, but it will be necessary for students to spend time on this outside
class.The class will be divided into smaller groups and each will create a poster that will act as an
aide when presenting back to the class.
Students will need to:
assess one or more of the critical approaches we have examined and demonstrate
how it has shifted their interpretation of a text
provide a close reading of a passage or poem of their choice
address one or more of the thematic issues brought to light in class discussions
Each group will need to divide the preparation equally, every member of the group must be involved
in the presentation.
B. 2 nd Assessment: Essay (50%)
This will be set at the end of week1, and due at the end of week 2. Students to write an assessed
essay or close-reading (max. 2000 words) on one of the following topics:
- Write a close reading of one of the Dickens extracts or one of the poems we have studied this
week. Pay close attention to language, rhetoric, metaphor, rhyme, rhythm, syntax and try to link
these points into your larger understanding of the function or purpose of the piece.
- „…these plays are all surface‟ (Neil Sammells, Wilde Style, 2000). Discuss this quotation with
reference to either The Importance of Being Earnest or A Woman of No Importance.
- „What emerges from Dickens‟s prose are images of worlds in flux‟ (David Pascoe, Selected
Journalism, 1997). Discuss this quotation with reference to the Dickens texts read in class.
- How does morality function in Dickens or Wilde?
- Compare the use of the female figure in poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina
Rossetti.
- Compare representations of masculinity from two texts that we have studied in class.
Monday 23 rd July: Introduction of the Brontës.
Brief lecture.
Reading and discussion of Jane Eyre.
Reading of extracts from Elizabeth Gaskell‟s The Life of Charlotte Bronte, and class discussion
Questions:
Who were the Brontës? How do we differentiate between them? What myths have
grown up around them?
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How does CB take us inside Jane Eyre‟s childhood consciousness?
Why and how is Jane different from other children? Why might CB want to construct
such a character?
What might psychoanalytic or biographical approaches bring to the text? What are
the drawbacks?
How does our reading of feminist or post-colonial criticism such as Gilbert and
Gubar, or Spivak impact on our understanding of Jane Eyre?
What role does religion play in the text?
Why is education an important theme in the novel?
What is troubling about the relationship between Rochester and Jane?
Tuesday 24 th July: Jane Eyre
DVD viewing of Jane Eyre, followed by reviews and discussion.
Wednesday 25 th July: Jane Eyre
Individual presentations on Jane Eyre.
Thursday 26 th July: Other Brontës
Group split up into smaller sections to read excerpts from other Brontë works, AB‟s The Tenant of
Wildfell Hall, EB‟s Wuthering Heights and EB‟s poetry.
Discussion of differences and similarities between CB and AB/EB in terms of style and theme.
Friday 27 th July: Field trip
Suggested further reading on the Brontës:
Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1987)
Rachel K. Carnell, „Feminism and the Public Sphere in Anne Brontë‟s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,
Novel 30:1 (1996), 32-55
Christina Colby, The Ends of History: Victorians and the ‘Woman Question’ (1991)
Stevie Davies, Emily Bronte: The Artist as a Free Woman (1983)
Terry Eagleton, Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës (1975, 2nd ed 1988)
Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857)
Janet Gezari, Last Things: Emily Brontë’s Poems (OUP, 2008)
Heather Glen, ed., Cambridge Companion to the Brontës (2002)
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the
Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979).
John Maynard, Charlotte Brontë and Sexuality (1984)
Elsie Michie, “From Simianized Irish to Oriental Despots: Heathcliff, Rochester, and Racial
Difference.” Novel 25 (1992): 125-40
Julia Miele Rodas, „“On the Spectrum”: Rereading Contact and Affect in Jane Eyre‟, Nineteenth-
Century Gender Studies 4: 2 (2008)
Lucasta Miller, The Brontë Myth (2001)
Julie Nash and Barbara A. Suess, eds. New Approaches to the Literary Art of Anne Brontë
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001)
Lorri Nandrea, „Desiring Difference: Sympathy and Sensibility in Jane Eyre‟, in Novel: a forum on
fiction 37 (2003), 112-134
M. Jeanne Peterson, „The Victorian Governess: Status Incongruence in Family and Society‟, in
Martha Vicinus, ed., Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age (1972)
Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England
(London: Virago, 1989). Ch1 on „Uneven Developments‟ is interesting, as is Ch 5 on „The
Anathematized Race: The Governess and Jane Eyre‟
Sally Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology (1996)
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, „Three Women‟s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism‟ Critical Inquiry
12:1 (1985), 243-261
Marianne Thormälen, The Brontës and Religion (1999)
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Week 2 assessment:
C. 3 rd Assessment: Individual Presentations
The assessment for the second week will be through an individual presentation given on Day 7.
This will be set up on Day 5 when the Brontës are introduced. There may be some class time
devoted to preparation for this task, but it will be necessary for students to spend more time on this
outside class. Presentations must be on some aspect of Jane Eyre, although the specific focus of
the presentation is up to each student.
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