19th Century British Literature: Authority & Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Culture
Malcolm Woodfield profile
MWF 10
The course examines the structure and construction of cultural authority in the nineteenth century, mainly in England. A series of prose texts show how power is authored and conflict represented by Victorian commentators, narrators and historians of aesthetics, political theory, literary criticism, architectural history and theory, visual representation, scientific taxonomy, Christian teleolgy, utopian fantasy, autobiography, and class conflict. The narratives are those of Mce to Poems 1853, "On Translating Homer," Essays in Criticism, Culture and Anarchy, Literature and Dogma), J.S. Mill (On Liberty, "What is Poetry?," "Coleridge," "Bentham"), Augustus Pugin (Contrasts), William Morris (News from Nowhere), Charles Darwin (On the Origin of Species, "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals"), Ludwig Feuerbach (Das Wesen des Christentums, trans. Marian Evans), Edmund Gosse (Father and Son), Elizabeth Gaskell (North and South), George Eliot (Middlemarch), Charles Dickens (Bleak House), Thomas Carlyle ("On History," "On History Again," Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches), Henry Mayhew (London Labour and the London Poor), Walter Pater (Studies in the History of the Renaissance), John Ruskin (Modern Painters, The Stones of Venice), R.H. Hutton (the Spectator). Discussion will be framed and informed by readings from Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, The Order of Things, Power/Knowledge, Discipline and Punish.
updated 2006-02-20
