ENG 430/535:
The Spectacle of Loss in the Nineteenth Century
 
 
Spring 2005 430: #11559; 535: #04558 Meets Thursdays, 6-9 Room: LL 262
 
 
 
  Dr. Dan Bivona Amy D'Antonio
Office hrs. Thursday 2-4 and by appointment Tuesdays 4:30-6:30 and by appointment
Office location Foundation 1150 LL 302D
Office phone 480-965-8260 480-965-0926
Email dbivona@asu.edu amy.dantonio@asu.edu
Homepage http://www.public.asu.edu/~dbivona/ http://www.public.asu.edu/~dantonio
 
 

 

Course Description

Beginning with Edmund Burke's Philosophical Inquiry…into the Sublime and the Beautiful, we explore how the Romantics and Victorians conceptualized loss, often in a way that allowed them to appreciate the lost object only because it had been lost. Lost origins, lost people, lost objects of value, lost body parts, the lost past: these are the chief manifestations of loss through which the Romantics and Victorians attempted to make their lives and narratives vicariously whole. We also want to investigate performances of loss and of attempts to recover lost objects. Such performances made spectacles of loss that elicited sympathetic responses in both real and fictional audiences. Spectacles of loss, then, impacted the relationship between artist and audience during an era in which notions of art and authorship were changing. We will be reading Burke and Smith, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Mary Shelley, Mrs. Wood, Hardy, Kipling, and Freud. We will supplement these with the work of some critics and theorists including Nietzsche, Kincaid, Derrida, Douglas, Kristeva, Hadley, and Marshall. This course fulfills the undergraduate theory requirement. Assignments for 430 include 2 critical papers, 1 critical research paper, contributions to weekly Blackboard discussions, and occasional quizzes.

 
 

Books

Author
Book
Publisher
Wordsworth and Coleridge Lyrical Ballads  
Shelley Frankenstein Bantam Dell
Tennyson "In Memoriam" Norton
Wood East Lynne Broadview
Kipling Kim Norton
Hardy Return of the Native Oxford UP
N.B. These books are now available at the ASU Bookstore. Other readings for the course can be found on the Web. Just follow the links in this online syllabus.

 
 

 

Course Requirements

Requirements in ENG 430: (2) 3-5-page critical papers (due week 5 and week 10), (1) critical research paper, 10-15 pages in length (week 16), periodic quizzes, regular attendance and regular contributions to class discussion both in class and on Blackboard.

Requirements in ENG 535: (3) 5-page critical papers (due week 4, week 8, and week 11), (1) critical research paper, 15-20 pages in length (due week 16), periodic quizzes, regular attendance, regular contributions to class and Blackboard discussion, (1) 10-minute class presentation (dates to be announced later in the semester).

Blackboard requirements for ENG 430 and ENG 535: Each student is responsible for contributing to the course discussion board 1) at least six questions over the course of the semester and 2) at least one response per week , to be posted before noon on Thursdays . We expect substantive questions and responses that directly address issues raised by the reading, lectures, classroom discussion and your classmates' postings. Provide your readers with the details and examples that led you to the question or comment you're posting. Read all postings in a discussion thread before replying and respond directly to other students' comments rather than just to the initial question. All postings should be clear and critical-- that is, you should always state which question or issue you address, briefly review what's already been said on the subject in the discussion thread, clearly state your own position or question, and give the evidence that led you to form your position or question.

Weighting of grades:

ENG 430
ENG 535
Assignment
Weight
Assignment
Weight
1st critical paper 20% 1st critical paper 15%
2nd critical paper 20% 2nd critical paper 15%
    3rd critical paper or presentation 15%
Critical research paper 35% Critical research paper 30%
Attendance, quiz grades, Blackboard assignments, class participation 25% Attendance, quiz grades, Blackboard assignments, class participation 25%

 

 
 
Date
Topic
Primary Readings
Secondary Readings
Jan. 20 Introduction: Loss    
Jan. 27 Sympathy
  • Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into...the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) Part 1, Sections 1-16 ("Novelty" through "Imitation"; Part 2, Sections 1-3 ("Of the Passion Caused by the Sublime" through "Obscurity"; Part 4, Sections 1-12 "Of the Efficient Cause of the Sublime and Beautiful" through "The Vibrations Must Be Similar"; Part 5, Sections 6 & 7 ("Poetry Not Strictly an Imitative Art" and "How Words Influence the Passions")
  • Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) Part 1, Section 1, ch. 1&2 ("Of Sympathy" and "Of the Pleasure of Mutual Sympathy"); Section 2, ch. 1&2 ("Of the passions which take their origins from the Body" and "Of those passions which take their origin from a particular turn or habit of the Imagination"); Part 2, Section 1, ch. 2 ("Of the proper Objects of Gratitude and Resentment")
  • Williams, "To Sensibility"
  • Wordsworth, "Sonnet"
  • Gray, "Elegy in a Country Churchyard"
Feb. 3 cont.
  • Lyrical Ballads (1798):
    • 1802 Preface
    • "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
    • "The Female Vagrant"
    • "The Thorn"
    • "The Mad Mother"
    • "The Convict"
    • "Tintern Abbey"
    • "The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman"
    • "There was a Boy"
    • "The Brothers"
    • "Lucy Gray"
    • "Poor Susan"
    • "The Two April Mornings"
    • "Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower"
    • "The Old Cumberland Beggar"
    • "A Poet's Epitaph"
    • "Ode: Intimations of Immortality"
    • "Resolution and Independence"
  • From Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journals
Feb. 10, g1 Lost Families
Feb. 17, ug1 cont.  
Feb. 24 cont.
  • Frankenstein cont.
 
Mar. 3 Lost Pasts  
Mar. 10, g2 cont.  
Mar. 17
Spring Break
Mar. 24, ug2 Lost Homes
  • East Lynne (1862)
Mar. 31, g3 cont.
  • East Lynne
 
Apr. 7 Lost Connections
  • Return of the Native
Apr. 14 cont.
  • Return of the Native
 
Apr. 21 Lost Treasures
  • Kim (1900)
Apr. 28 cont.
  • Kim
 
May 5, ug3, g4 Lost body parts
  • "Little Hans" (access TBA)
 

*These items are accessible through the ASU Libraries' authentication page: http://www.asu.edu/lib/resources/indexabs.htm

**These items are on reserve. See the course Blackboard site for information about accessing reserve readings.

 
 

Supplementary Readings

Theory:

Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism Online*

General Research:

Various databases including MLA Bibliography and Historical Abstracts as well as Literature Online*

*All these databases are accessible with asurite ID and PW through the authentication page of the ASU Libraries: http://www.asu.edu/lib/resources/indexabs.htm

Supplementary Readings Organized by Topic
(these are just the highlights).


Loss, Spectacle, and Sympathy:
• Anderson, Amanda. Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993.
• Barker-Benfield, G.J. The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.
• Batten, Guinn. The Orphaned Imagination: Melancholy and Commodity Culture in English Romanticism. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1998.
• Bell, Michael. Sentimentalism, Ethics, and the Culture of Feeling. New York: Palgrave, 2000.
• Brooks, Peter. Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993.
• Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful [1757]. Ed. David Womersley. London: Penguin, 1998.
• Dever, Carolyn. Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.
• Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966.
• Engels, Frederick. The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. Trans.Ernest Untermann. 1884. Chicago: Kerr, 1902.
• Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” SE 14, 239-258.
• Hadley, Elaine. Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800-1885. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995.
• Hinton, Laura. The Perverse Gaze of Sympathy: Sadomasochistic Sentiments from Clarissa to Rescue 911. Albany: SUNY P, 1991.
• Hochman, Baruch and Ilja Wachs. Dickens: The Orphan Condition. Madison: Farleigh Dickinson UP and London: Associated University Presses, 1999.
• Jameson, Frederic. “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject.” Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977): 338-395.
• Klein, Melanie. “Early Sages of the Oedipus Conflict.” International Journal of Psycho Analysis 9 (1928): 167-180.
• _____. “The Importance of Symbol-Formation in the Development of the Ego.” International Journal of Psycho Analysis 11 (1930): 24-39.
• _____. “Infantile Anxiety-Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and in the Creative Impulse.” International Journal of Psycho Analysis 10 (1929): 436-443.
• _____. The Psycho-Analysis of Children. London: Hogarth, 1932.
• _____. “The Psychological Principles of Infant Analysis.” International Journal of Psycho Analysis 8 (1927): 25-37.
• Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.
• _____. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.
• Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977.
• Lenard, Mary. Preaching Pity: Dickens, Gaskell, and Sentimentalism in Victorian Culture. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.
• Marshall, David. The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.
• McGann, Jerome. The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996.
• Newlyn, Lucy. Reading, Writing and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.
• Noble, Marianne. The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 2000.
• Ramazani, Jahan. “Hardy and the Poetics of Melancholia: Poems of 1912-13 and Other Elegies for Emma” ELH 58.4 (1991): 957-977.
• Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments [1759]. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2000.
• Todd, Janet. Sensibility: An Introduction. London and New York: Methuen, 1986.
• Voskuil, Lynn M. “Feeling Public: Sensation Theater, Commodity Culture, and the Victorian Public Sphere.” Victorian Studies 44.2 (2002): 245-74.
• Walkowitz, Judith R. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. London: Virago, 1992.
• Žižek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2000.

Industrialism and Social Class:
• Booth, Charles. Life and Labour of the People in London. New York: AMS, 1970 [reprint of the 1902-04 edition].
• Booth, William. In Darkest England, and the Way Out. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1890.
• Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974.
• Cannadine, David. The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. New York: Doubleday, 1990.
• Cobbett, William. Rural Rides. London: J. M. Dent, 1912 [1825].
• Engels, Frederick. The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. Trans. Florence Kelley Wischnewtzky. London: Allen and Unwin, 1952 [first English translation: 1892].
• Gagnier, Regenia. Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832-1920. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.
• Gallagher, Catherine. The Industrial Revolution of English Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
• Gaskell, Elizabeth. North and South. Ed. Dorothy Collin. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971 [1854].
Gender and Class in Modern Europe. Edited Laura L. Frader and Sonya Rose. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1996.
• Himmelfarb, Gertrude. The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age. New York: Knopf, 1984.
• Keating, Peter J. The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971.
• Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor. New York: Dover 1968 [1861-1862].
• Mearns, Andrew. The Bitter Cry of Outcast London. Edited with introd. by Anthony S. Wohl. New York, Humanities Press, 1970 [1885].
• Perkin, Harold. The Rise of Professional Society: England Since 1880. London and New York: Routledge, 1989.
• Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. London: Methuen, 1986.
• Stedman Jones, Gareth. The Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832-1982. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983.
• __________. Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society. Oxford: Clarendon, 1971.
• Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Random House, 1966.
• Thompson, F. M. L. The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830-1900. London: HarperCollins, 1988.
• Watt, Ian P. The Rise of the Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964.
• Webb, Beatrice. The Diary of Beatrice Webb. Edited by Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982-1985.
• Wohl, Anthony S. The Eternal Slum: Housing and Social Policy in Victorian London. London: E. Arnold, 1977.
Darwinism:
• Beer, Gillian. Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. London: Routledge, 1983.
• Burrow, J. W. Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966.
• Draenos, Stan. Freud's Odyssey: Psychoanalysis and the End of Metaphysics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982.
• Levine, George. Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
• Lombroso, Cesare. The Man of Genius. Trans. Anonymous. London: W. Scott Pub. Co., 1910.
• Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1987.
• Stocking, George W., Jr. Victorian Anthropology. New York: Macmillan, 1987.

Gender:
• Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge, 1990.
• Crosby, Christina. The Ends of History: Victorians and "The Woman Question." New York: Routledge, 1991.
• Cvetkovich, Ann. Mixed Feelings : Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992.
• Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven : Yale University Press, 1979.
• Poovey, Mary. Uneven Developments: the Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
• Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. New York: Viking, 1990.
Rewriting the Victorians: Theory, History, and the Politics of Gender. Edited by Linda M.Shires. New York: Routledge, 1992.
• Tuchman, Gaye. Edging Women Out: Victorian Novelists, Publishers, and Social Change. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.
• Warhol, Robyn R. Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel. New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, 1989.

Imperialism:
• Bivona, Daniel. Desire and Contradiction: Imperial Visions and Domestic Debates in Victorian Literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990.
• __________. British Imperial Literature, 1870-1940: Writing and the Administration of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.
• Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988.
• Bongie, Chris. Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de Siècle. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.
• David, Deirdre. Rule Britannia: Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1995.
• Hobson, J. A. Imperialism: A Study. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1938 [1902].
• Hyam, Ronald. Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1990.
Imperialism and Popular Culture. Ed. John M. Mackenzie. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1986.
• Krebs, Paula M. Gender, Race, and the Writing of Empire: Public Discourse and the Boer War. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.
• McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather. New York and London: Routledge, 1995.
Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi K. Bhabha. New York and London: Routledge, 1990.
• Richards, Thomas. The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire. London and New York: Verso, 1993.
• Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979.
• __________. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993.
• Sharpe, Jenny. Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
• Tidrick, Kathryn. Empire and the English Character. London: I.B. Tauris and Co., 1992.

General:
• Altick, Richard D. Victorian People and Ideas. New York and London: Norton, 1973.
• Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso, 1991.
• Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,1987.
• Hobsbawm, E. J. Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day. London: Penguin, 1999.
• Poovey, Mary. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
• Poovey, Mary. Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830-1864. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
• Thompson, F. M. L. The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830-1900. London: HarperCollins, 1988.

The Novel:
• Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard UP, 1992.
• Kucich, John. Repression in Victorian Fiction: Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1987.
• Litvak, Joseph. Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
• Miller, D. A. The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Sexuality Studies:
• Dollimore, Jonathan. Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.
• Dowling, Linda. Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994.
• Ellis, Havelock. The Psychology of Sex. London: W. Heinemann, Medical Books, 1942.
• Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Random House, 1979.
• __________. The History of Sexuality. Vols. 1-3. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1980.
• Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Liveright, 1950.
• __________. Civilization and Its Discontents. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1962 [1927].
• __________. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Trans. James Strachey. New York and London: London: Imago, 1949 [1907].
• __________. Totem and Taboo. Trans. A. A. Brill. New York: Random House, 1946 [1914].
• Kincaid, James. Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture. New York and London: Routledge, 1992.
• Malinowski, Bronislaw. Sex and Repression in Savage Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985 [1927].
• Marcus, Steven. The Other Victorians; a Study of Sexuality and Pornograhy in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England. New York: Basic, 1966.
• Mason, Michael. The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1994.
• Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
• __________. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
• Sinfield, Alan. The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Movement. London: Cassell, 1994.
• Sussman, Herbert. Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art. Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1995.
• Weeks, Jeffrey. Against Nature: Essays on History, Sexuality, and Identity. London: Rivers Oram, 1991.
• __________. Sex, Politics, and Society: the Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800. London and New York: Longman, 1981.