Allen MacDuffie

Scholarly Publication

Course description to be added October 14.

Course Number: T C 302

Course Title: Literature and Biology

Semester/Year: Spring 2022

Instructor Name: Allen MacDuffie

Description

Literature and biology may seem like very different disciplines and modes of inquiry, but they share common ground in one important sense: both work, in different ways, to define what it means to be human. In this course, we will explore the intersection of these two discourses, reading widely in a variety of scientific and literary texts from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. We will take as our “center of gravity” Charles Darwin’s epoch-making On the Origin of Species, and discuss the impact it had on religion, psychology, ecological thinking, and the arts. We will consider the ways in which scientists, philosophers, and artists have posed profound, exciting, and troubling questions about how humans have evolved, how we are altering our own biological make-up, and how we continue to re-draw the boundaries between humans and non-human animals, life and non-life, the organism and the machine. We will also consider the ways in which biology was – and still is – often insidiously inter-articulated with racist and imperial ideologies in the period and beyond.

Required Texts

Required texts may include:

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Victora LaValle, Destroyer

James Baldwin, “Stranger in the Village”

Charles Darwin, selected chapters from On the Origin of Species

Loren Eiseley, selected essays

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower

Course Requirements

Class participation (20%)

One in-class presentation (15%)

First essay (5-6 pages) (15%)

Second essay (7-8 pages) (20%)

Third essay (9-10 pages) (30%)

Instructor Bio

I received my Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2006, where I wrote a dissertation on energy science and Victorian literature. That dissertation eventually became a book: Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2014. I’m currently wrapping up a book about Darwinand nineteenth-century literature.

Scholarly Publication

This course is designed for students prepared to revise a seminar paper, Master's report, professional conference paper, or dissertation chapter into a publishable article that they will submit to a peer-reviewed academic journal in Summer 2021. We will demystify the editorial process of academic journals and decode the specialized conventions of the article genre, focusing specifically on the methodological, argumentative, and stylistic moves that successful authors make. Students will develop strategies of "radical revision" to turn their polished essay, report, paper, or chapter into a finely wrought article that makes an identifiable contribution to its field/s. The course will begin with the reading and discussing of materials concerned with the process of turning essays into articles and with students identifying appropriate journals for their essays. Next, students will consult with the professors and work closely in small rotating writing groups as they revise their essays. Admission to the course is by Graduate Adviser approval.

This course has a number of aims: to introduce you to the revision and editorial processes; to familiarize you with the journal article genre and publication venues; to make you more comfortable asking for and responding to writing feedback; and to help you land that valuable first publication. Our goal is for you to establish a productive writing process, learn and make discoveries, and produce the best work possible.

E 375L  l  Victorian Literature

Instructor:  MacDuffie, E

Unique #: 35100

Semester:  Fall 2020

Cross-lists:  n/a

Flags:  Global Cultures

Restrictions:  none

Prerequisites:  Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description:  In this course we will study a number of major works of literature from the Victorian period (aka the Age of Coal) paying special attention to the rise of a fossil-fuel culture, and the ways in which novelists and poets represented the impact humans were having on the environment. We will pay close attention to the scientific background of the period, including the beginnings of the science of ecology in Charles Darwin’s groundbreaking On the Origin of Species, and discuss the ways in which many of the environmental concerns we struggle with today were first identified and represented in the period.

Texts:  Authors may include George Eliot, Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, H.G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad.

Requirements & Grading:  Requirements & Grading:  Attendance and class participation: 25%; short response papers and in-class writing assignments: 25%; 5-6 page essay: 20%; final 6-7-page essay: 30%.

Eliot, James, Woolf

This course will focus on three novelists whose work broke new ground in narrative form and the representation of consciousness in literature: George Eliot, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf. We will explore not only the narratological questions involved in depicting inner experience, but the historical context of our authors and the shifting scientific and psychological understandings of the mind in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We will also consider many of the formal issues and questions these writers grappled with, including the demands and restrictions of the marriage plot; the limitations of language; the positioning of the protagonist within a field of minor characters; and the contested and uncertain status of “realism” at this moment in literary history. Although we will read some scholarly literature on all three writers, our main work will be closely and carefully attending to the novels themselves; therefore, this course would be suitable for MCW and NWP students as well as for literature Ph.D. students. 

E s350R  l  Victorian Oxford-GBR

Instructor:  MacDuffie, E

Unique #: 80795

Semester: Summer 2019, Oxford Summer Program, second session

Cross-lists: n/a

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: Oxford in the nineteenth century was a place of contradictions – a vibrant center for culture and artistic experimentation that always had one foot in the past; a place of inquiry and learning that was characterized by many exclusions and restrictions.  In this course we will consider the university and the city of Oxford through the lens of a number of significant nineteenth-century texts set in and around the region and by artists with local ties. We will read (Oxford professor and librarian) Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderlandand Through the Looking Glassand visit some of the locales that inspired his famous flights of nonsense.  We will discuss the Pre-Raphaelite movement in poetry and visual arts and tour the Ashmolean and Victoria & Albert Museums where many stunning paintings by members of this school can be found.  We will also consider artists affiliated with the group like John Ruskin and William Morris.  The Pitt Rivers and Natural History Museums will give us a sense of the period’s urge for collection and anthropological inquiry and thus provide a unique window into the culture of the British Empire at its zenith.  Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscurewill give us a darker picture of life in nineteenth-century Oxford from the point of view of the excluded, while Oscar Wilde will offer a lighter, but no less acute take on Victorian culture and mores. 

Assignments and Grading: regular attendance and active participation in class discussion (30%).  Final journal assignment due on the last day of class (70%).

Tentative List of Texts: Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure; Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderlandand Through the Looking Glass; William Morris, selected works; Oscar Wilde, selected works.

Instructor:  Edward A MacDuffie III, Associate Professor

Unique #:  35588

Semester:  Spring 2019

Cross-lists:  n/a

Restrictions: English Honors & Plan I Honors

Computer Instruction: No

Prerequisite:  Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: In this course, we will read deeply in three of the most significant novelists in the history of English literature:  George Eliot, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf.  All three writers pushed the novel into new artistic, philosophical, and psychological territory, and all three expanded the possibilities for the representation of selfhood and consciousness.  We will consider the formal and thematic connections between and among many of their works, as well James’s and Woolf’s revealing discussions of Eliot.  Although our primary focus will be the novels, we will also take selective forays into the social, intellectual, and cultural context that helped shape their writing. Lastly, we will consider how the work of these writers, taken together, charts the transition between the Victorian and Modernist periods, and the emergence of a new, distinctly and recognizably modern, sensibility.

Possible texts include: George Eliot: The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch• Henry James: The Turn of the Screw, The Portrait of a Lady, Washington Square• Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse, Orlando, Mrs. Dalloway, The Waves

Grading policy: Regular attendance and active participation, 20%; In-class presentation, 20%; First essay (6-7 pages), 20%; Final essay (12-15 pages), 40%.

The Bildungsroman

In this course, we will focus on a significant subgenre of the novel – the bildungsroman, or novel of formation – as it was shaped by a number of (mostly) British writers. The bildungsroman has its roots in the nineteenth century – is, in fact, sometimes discussed as a quintessentially nineteenth-century phenomenon – and we will therefore begin with some “paradigmatic” Victorian works. When we move into the modernist and postmodern periods, we will question the normative model that tends to treat these later works as experiments or limit-cases, and read a number of critics who have done important work challenging and reshaping the received model. We will also consider the bildungsroman from an eco-critical perspective, thinking about the role of nature, non-human animals, and biological experience in plots focused on the social consolidation of the self.

Possible Texts Include:

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

David Mitchell, Black Swan Green

Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

Instructor:  MacDuffie, A

Unique #:  35440-35475

Semester:  Fall 2017

Cross-lists:  C L 315

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites:  One of the following: E 303C (or 603A), RHE 306, 306Q, or T C 303C (or 603A).

Description:  Please refer to the course schedule for course days, time, and room location: http://registrar.utexas.edu/schedules/.

Global Modern Literature—

This course considers a number of masterpieces of world literature with an eye to the special role literature plays in making “invisible” phenomena or experiences visible.  We will read texts from a number of countries, and think about the strategies authors use to make the unseen, forgotten, denied, disappeared, or difficult-to-represent realities of their world available to their readers.

Texts may include:  William Blake, selected poems; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; James Baldwin, selected essays; J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians; Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake.

Requirements & Grading:  Attendance, active participation in TA-led discussions: 20%; Essay (3-4 pages): 20%; Midterm: 20%; Final exam: 40%.

Instructor:  MacDuffie, E

Unique #:  81775

Semester:  Summer 2017, second session

Cross-lists:  C L 315

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites:  One of the following: E 603A, RHE 306, 306Q, or T C 603A.

Description:  Please refer to the course schedule for course days, time, and room location: http://registrar.utexas.edu/schedules/.

Global Modern Literature—

This course considers a number of masterpieces of world literature with an eye to the special role literature plays in making “invisible” phenomena or experiences visible.  We will read texts from a number of countries, and think about the strategies authors use to make the unseen, forgotten, denied, disappeared, or difficult-to-represent realities of their world available to their readers.

Texts may include:  William Blake, selected poems; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; James Baldwin, selected essays; J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians; Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake.

Requirements & Grading:  Attendance, active participation in TA-led discussions: 20%; Essay (3-4 pages): 20%; Midterm: 20%; Final exam: 40%.

Instructor:  MacDuffie, E

Unique #:  35510

Semester:  Spring 2017

Cross-lists:  n/a

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisite:  Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description:  In recent years, the concept of “sustainability” has become central to our understanding of the human impact upon the environment.  The word has been used to describe everything from fresh water to deep-sea fish populations to atmospheric CO2 levels.  But coming to grips with the “unsustainable” pace of modern consumption patterns is difficult, in part because the scale is so large, the numbers so vast, and the consequences (seemingly) so distant and abstract.  So how can artists, activists, journalists, and scholars represent issues of sustainability – including, and especially, climate change – in vivid, memorable, and affecting ways?  In this course, we’ll consider that question by investigating a diverse array of texts and considering the various strategies employed to represent environmental crisis.  We will look at a number of genres and modes – from theoretical texts, to novels, to documentary reporting – and pay special attention to the role speculative fiction plays in imagining the possible futures brought about by an unsustainable present.  We will also consider how the consequences of environmental destruction are borne disproportionally by so-called third-world countries.

Possible authors include:  Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson, Octavia Butler, Indra Sinha, Paolo Bacigalupi, Charles Mann, Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein.

Requirements & Grading (tentative): Class participation: 25%; Weekly response papers: 15%; Essay 1: 25%; Essay 2: 35%.

E s375L  l  Victorian Literature-GBR

Instructor:  MacDuffie, E

Unique #:  82155

Semester:  Summer 2016, second session

Cross-lists:  n/a

Restrictions: Oxford Summer Program participants

Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites:  Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description:  In this course we will study the representation of Victorian London through a number of major works from the era.  We will discuss the place of London in the Victorian cultural imaginary, and many of the crucial concerns about nineteenth-century urban life, including: crime and detection, anonymity, information overload, environmental damage, class mobility, and individual self-fashioning.

Texts:  Authors include Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle.

Requirements & Grading:  Class participation and in-class writing exercises, 25%; Reading Response Journal: 50%; “Mapping London” exercise & presentation: 25%.

E 360S  l  Sustainability and Representation

Instructor:  MacDuffie, E

Unique #:  34570

Semester:  Fall 2015

Cross-lists:  n/a

Flags:  Global Cultures; Independent Inquiry; Writing

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisite: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: In recent years, the concept of “sustainability” has become central to our understanding of the human impact upon the environment. The word has been used to describe everything from fresh water to deep-sea fish populations to atmospheric CO2 levels. But coming to grips with the “unsustainable” pace of modern consumption patterns is difficult, in part because the scale is so large, the numbers so vast, and the consequences (seemingly) so distant and abstract. So how can artists, activists, journalists, and scholars represent issues of sustainability – including, and especially, climate change – in vivid, memorable, and affecting ways? In this course, we’ll consider that question by investigating a diverse array of texts and considering the various strategies employed to represent environmental crisis. We will look at a number of genres and modes – from theoretical texts, to novels, to documentary reporting – and pay special attention to the role speculative fiction plays in imagining the possible futures brought about by an unsustainable present. We will also consider how the consequences of environmental destruction are borne disproportionally by so-called third-world countries.

Possible authors include: Charles Darwin, Garrett Hardin, Rachel Carson, Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and Hayao Miyazaki.

Requirements & Grading (tentative): 35% Independent Project; 15% Essay 1; 15% Essay 2; 20% Class participation; 15% In-class presentation.

In recent years, Romantic poetry and Victorian prose have both been fertile territory for eco-critical analysis. This course asks how - or if - we can put Victorian poetry into this conversation. After considering William Wordsworth and other Romantic writers, we will ask why the next generation – Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Hardy, and others – have thus far received almost no attention from ecologically minded critics. Is this a gap or lag in the criticism? Did Victorian poets turn away from the environmental interests of their predecessors? Or is it a canon problem - are we looking at the "wrong" Victorian poets to find these kinds of concerns? Thus the course both serves as an introduction of sorts to the major poets of the mid and late nineteenth century, and an inquiry into current trends in Victorian and eco-critical studies.

Description:

About ten years ago, the poet Edward Hirsch published a book called How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, and that title nicely captures the chief aims of this course. For an entire year, we will immerse ourselves in some of the most moving, strange, challenging, memorable, profound, and beautiful poetic works written in English. Spanning the English Renaissance to the modern day, the course will explore a number of significant forms and genres, including the sonnet, the ode, the elegy, and (everyone’s favorite) the dramatic monologue. The class will emphasize the practice of “close reading” - i.e. sustained, careful attention to the form, structure, and language of literary texts - through a number of in-class exercises and creative/critical assignments.

Texts/Readings:

Authors during the fall semester TBA but may include: William Shakespeare, John Donne, John Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Authors during the spring semester TBA but may include: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Larkin, Derek Walcott, Anne Carson.

Assignments:

Class participation will count as 20% of the final grade. Students are expected to participate actively in class discussions, which includes not just speaking but listening attentively to your peers.

There will be three essay assignments representing 70% of the final grade:

Essay 1: 20%

Essay 2: 20%

Essay 3: 30 %

In addition each student will give one in-class presentation representing 10% of the final grade.

About the Professor:

I received my Ph.D. in 2006 from Harvard University, where I wrote a dissertation on science and the Victorian literary imagination. Portions of that work have appeared in the journals Representations and English Literary History. My first book, entitled Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination, will be published by Cambridge University Press in July 2014.

Approaches To Disciplinary Inquiries

Course objectives.  This required, one-semester course will:

• Allow students to gain a fuller sense of the complexity and variety of research methods available to literary scholars
• Better position students to embark on Masters Report and dissertation research
• Introduce students to the Harry Ransom Center and other collections-based resources
• Offer a shared, “cohort” experience for all second-year graduate students
• Help students further orient themselves to both the department and the profession.

Method of Instruction.  This course will be organized into 3-5 modules, each of which will center on a specific mode of research or criticism. Modules will be organized around major methodological issues, which may include:

• Archives (e.g., book history; bibliography and textual studies; digital humanities)
• Cultures (e.g., multiculturalism; cultural studies; observational methods)
• Histories and historicisms
• Professions (e.g., history of the profession; humanities in the 21st century)
• Readings (e.g., close reading; deconstruction; translation; reception)
• Theories (e.g., the life and “death” of theory)

Texts.  Required texts may include:

• Wayne Booth, et al, The Craft of Research Third Edition (Chicago, 2008) ISBN: 9780226065663
• Harryette Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary (California, 2002) ISBN: 9780520231436

NB: Although the course is scheduled for a three-hour block, we will meet for only two hours each week. This will allow students to visit on-campus archives, conduct research, attend talks, &c.

Instructor:  MacDuffie, E            Areas:  IV / U

Unique #:  35990            Flags:  n/a

Semester:  Fall 2013            Restrictions:  English Honors

Cross-lists:  n/a            Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites: Enrollment in or completion of at least one Honors section of an English course, admission to the English Honors Program, and consent of the honors adviser.

Description: According to the Honors Thesis Manual, a thesis is “a sustained examination of a central idea or question, developed in a professional and mature manner under the guidance of a faculty supervisor and a second reader.” That sounds easy enough, but how does one get there from here? This course offers something of a roadmap. Over the course of the term we will examine literary criticism from the “inside out” and hone skills essential to a successful honors thesis.

Along the way, we will address a number of questions, both practical—How do I use the MLA Bibliography? What’s the difference between a footnote and an endnote?—and theoretical—What does it mean to make an argument about literature? Who has authority in an act of interpretation? This course will: first and foremost prepare students to write an honors thesis; interrogate methods of literary and cultural interpretation; consider what it means to make literary arguments and conduct literary research; help students to improve their research, critical thinking, reading, and writing skills.

Texts: Wayne Booth, et al, The Craft of Research (Third Edition) (University Of Chicago Press, 2008). #978-0226065663; Marjorie Garber, A Manifesto for Literary Studies (University of Washington Press, 2003). #978-0295983448; Gerald Graff, Cathy Birkenstein, They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing (Norton, 2005). # 978-0393924091.

Requirements & Grading: (assignment logistics, rationales, and approaches will be discussed at length during class)

Final Thesis Prospectus (4-6 pp.) & Annotated Bibliography (20-25+ items)            40%

Writing Sample (15-20 pp. section or sections of your actual thesis)            30%

In-Class Performance (quality & consistency of discussion; preparation; engagement;

informal writing; writing-process & bibliography tasks; peer feedback; Symposium)            30%

On-time Attendance (note: every absence beginning with #4 will reduce grade; NC at #9)            Required

On-time Completion of Reading, Writing-Process, Research, & Peer Feedback Assignments            Required

Plus/minus grades will be assigned for the final grade of the course. The university does not recognize the grade of A+. Evaluation percentages approximate & subject to minor change.

The Scientific Imaginary in Victorian Science and Poetry

This course will closely examine a number of scientific discourses from the nineteenth century, including geology, biology, and psychology, and discuss how those discourses were employed, revised, subverted, resisted, or elaborated in major works of poetry and fiction. One of our guiding interests will be about how science and literature can be put into a productive scholarly conversation, and to that end we will investigate a range of approaches and critical methodologies, and discuss recent trends in the field.  Of particular interest will be discussing the implications Victorian scientific discourse has for our understanding of literary form.

Readings may include:

Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam

Charlotte Bront?, Jane Eyre

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone

George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

Algernon Charles Swinburne, poems

Gerard Manley Hopkins, poems

Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

Selections from:

George Combe, The Constitution of Man 

Robert Chambers, The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals

Alexander Bain, Mind and Body

Herbert Spencer, Principles of Psychology

This course is an introduction to some of the most significant works of Western literature, with a particular emphasis on “fictions of formation.” Beginning with important classical and Renaissance precursor texts, we will focus on the nineteenth-century bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story, in its classic form. Our reading of these works will be informed by recent critical scholarship, and by essays on the historical and cultural background of the period. We will pay close attention to the question of gender, and the ways in which the process of identity formation is represented differently in texts about female protagonists by female authors.

In the second semester, we will extend our investigation by focusing on twentieth- century and twenty-first century texts from a range of national and cultural traditions.  If the first semester focuses on “fictions of formation” then the second semester emphasizes “fictions of deformation” – stories in which the process of achieving a stable identity and finding one’s place in the world is blocked, thwarted, or shown to be an illusory goal.

Texts/Readings:

Authors during the fall semester TBA but may include: William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bront? and George Eliot.   

Authors during the spring semester TBA but may include: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Jean Rhys, and Junot Diaz.

Assignments:

Class participation will count as 20% of the final grade. Students are expected to participate actively in class discussions, which includes not just speaking but attentive listening to your peers. There will be three essay assignments representing 70% of the final grade: Essay 1: 20% Essay 2: 20% Essay 3: 30 % In addition each student will give one in-class presentation representing 10% of the final grade

About the Professor:

I received my Ph.D. in 2007 from Harvard University, where I wrote a dissertation on thermodynamics and the Victorian literary imagination.  Portions of that work have appeared in the journals Representations and English Literary History.  Currently I am finishing a book manuscript entitled The City and the Sun: Energy, Thermodynamics, and the Victorian Ecological Imagination, which expands upon my dissertation research.  

My areas of interest include the nineteenth- and twentieth- century novel, Victorian poetry, narrative theory, and science and literature studies.  

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has called Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, “perhaps the most powerful idea ever to occur to a human mind.” This course investigates the impact that idea had upon the cultural life of Victorian Britain through a close reading of several post-Darwinian narratives. After reading his seminal 1859 work On the Origin of Species and its “sequel” The Descent of Man, we will discuss how Darwin’s theory helped shape both the preoccupations and the narrative practices of a number of major Victorian novelists. Our readings will run the gamut from works that grapple explicitly with Darwinian subject matter to those that bear a less obvious, but no less significant, imprint. We will consider how “Darwin’s dangerous idea” affected the understanding of a great many subjects, including the relationship between human beings and animals, the organization of the natural world, the age of the universe, and of course, the viability of religious-based conceptions of creation. We will attend to the ways in which such questions appear in the thematic armature of literary works, and we will consider the impact they had on formal concerns, such as plot and narrative structure.

Texts (subject to change)

Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species and/or The Descent of Man; T.H. Huxley: Evolution and Ethics; George Eliot: Middlemarch; Lewis Carroll: Alice In Wonderland; Through the Looking Glass; Thomas Hardy: Tess of the d’Urbervilles; H.G. Wells: The Time Machine; Joseph Conrad: Lord Jim; Gillian Beer: Darwin’s Plots; George Levine: Darwin and the Novelists.

Requirements

Essays: 85%; Class participation: 15%.

Victorian Evolutionary Narratives

This course examines the relationship between evolutionary biology and Victorian narrative.  We will read deeply in Darwin, including his seminal works On The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man.  Firmly grounded in the scientific discussions of the period, we will then consider how evolutionary thought left its mark on the aesthetic, structural, and thematic concerns of a number of key Victorian novelists, including Eliot, Hardy, Wells, and Conrad.  A good part of our conversation will be methodological – that is, how it is one goes about making a compelling case for the connection between literature and science, how we might stop ourselves from seeing Darwin everywhere once we start looking, and whether there is a way to draw distinctions between reading and "reading-into."   As a way of opening up such questions, we will take a look at how other critics have constructed their arguments and made, or not made, the case for the presence of evolutionary thought in fictional texts.  We will pay special attention to the two canonical critical books on Darwin and nineteenth-century literature—Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots and George Levine’s Darwin and the Novelists—but we will consider a number of other critical voices as well.  Lastly, we will review some of the most recent critical work on Darwin’s place in Victorian studies to get a sense of the future directions for this topic.

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: This course focuses on the fiction of one of the masters of English prose, Joseph Conrad. We will read several of the major novels of Conrad’s career, including (but not limited to) Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and The Secret Agent, as well as selections from his memoir A Personal Record. Our reading will be informed by a number of historical works that will help put his novels in context. We will read selections from Adam Hochschild’s history of the Belgian Congo, King Leopold’s Ghost, in order to better understand the background of Heart of Darkness. We will also read about turn-of-the-century anarchism and terrorism to help illuminate The Secret Agent. In addition to discussing the ways in which Conrad’s texts comment upon important social and cultural issues of his time, we will also consider them from a formal point of view, as key works in the history of the novel. 

Texts: Conrad: Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, others; Adam Hochschild: King Leopold’s Ghost.

Requirements & Grading: Class participation and in-class writing assignments: 20%; Paper 1 (5-6 pages): 20%; Paper 2 (6-8 pages): 25%; Paper 3 (8-10 pages): 35%.

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: Victorian Fiction--

In this course we will study a number of major works of prose fiction from the Victorian period, focusing on the interest in representing “other” worlds and experiences, and the ways in which both the subject matter and the codes of conventional realism were challenged.  Authors include Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad.

 Requirements & Grading: Class participation and in-class writing assignments, 20%; 4-5-page essay, 20%;  6-7-page essay, 25%; 8-9-page essay, 35%.

Readings from the “Golden Age” of children’s literature. Three lecture hours a week for one semester. The subject of each class meeting may be determined from the assigned reading for the day (see following), supplemented by critical texts of the instructor’s choosing.  The instructor retains the right to vary this syllabus. 

Requirements:

Students are required to be in class, on time, and fully prepared to participate actively in discussion. You are permitted three unexcused absences; each subsequent absence will result in your course grade being lowered by one letter; two latenesses count as an absence. Students with disabilities may request appropriate academic accommodations from the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, Services for Students with Disabilities.

Grades:

Class participation (20%)
Essay #1  4-5 pages  (20%)  due Wednesday, February 24
Essay #2  7-8 pages (25%) due Friday, April 9
Essay #3 8-10 pages  (35%) due Friday, May 7

Plus/minus grades will be used. 

Required Texts:

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Books
George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin and Phantastes
Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island
Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
J.M. Barrie, Peter and Wendy

All other readings will either be distributed in class or made available online.

For more information, please download the full syllabus.

Selected readings from the Victorian period.  Three lecture hours a week for one semester. The subject of each class meeting may be determined from the assigned reading for the day (see following), supplemented by critical texts of the instructor’s choosing.  The instructor retains the right to vary this syllabus.

Requirements:

Students are required to be in class, on time, and fully prepared to participate actively in discussion. You are permitted three unexcused absences; each subsequent absence will result in your course grade being lowered by one letter; two latenesses count as an absence. Students with disabilities may request appropriate academic accommodations from the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, Services for Students with Disabilities.

Grades:

Class participation (20%)
Essay #1  4-5 pages  (20%)  due Wednesday, February 24
Essay #2  7-8 pages (25%) due Friday, April 2
Essay #3 8-10 pages  (35%) due Friday, May 7
 
Plus/minus grades will be used. 

Required Texts:

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
Henry James, Washington Square
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

All other readings will either be distributed in class or made available online.

For more information, please download the full syllabus.