ENGLISH 430/545

(66930/68639)

Summer I, 1999

Daily, 9:20-10:50

LL 103

LL 549B

5-7748

dbivona@asu.edu  

 

 

Office Hours:

M, T, W, Th 2-3

and by appointment

Books:

Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights. Bantam, 1981.

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Oxford UP, 1982.

Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Books. NAL, 1995.

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Vintage, 1977.

 

These books are now available at the ASU Bookstore.

Course Overview:

This seminar will explore the complicated way in which some nineteenth-century writers attempted to construct and stabilize the concept of "masculinity" or "manliness." Necessarily, we will also explore a number of writers who dedicated themselves to disrupting and challenging these norms. The course title uses the plural, in other words, because this course is grounded in the assumption (an easy one to demonstrate) that Victorian culture generated a variety of different and often conflicting models of "manliness." Moreover, these models of manliness seem to play increasingly important roles in a wide variety of important social and cultural movements over the course of the century, from the emergence of a middle class patriarchy to the development of feminist consciousness to the creation of the Aestheticist movement. We will be reading many different types of texts -- poetry, prose, and novels; some written by men, some by women -- and will attempt to survey this topic in as much of its variety as we can within the time constraints.

Undergraduate Requirements (ENG 430):

2 critical papers should be 5-7 pages in length. Deadlines can be found on the syllabus below. There will be occasional quizzes (Topics for Paper #1; Topics for Paper #2)

Graduate Requirements (ENG 545):

3 critical papers (5-7 pages in length). Due dates TBA. (Topics for Paper #2).

A Note on Secondary Sources:

A supplemental reading list on Victorian masculinity can be found here.  A broader list of secondary sources on Victorian literature and culture can be found here. All required readings in the syllabus above can be found either in the books purchased for the course or on the Web through links supplied above.

Links to valuable indexes, bibliographies, databases, and other sources can be found on my web page.  For your papers you will likely wish to make use of the  MLA Bibliography, the  LITIR Victorian Database, and, for general information, the Encyclopedia Britannica.  You should also note that the Chadwyck Healey literary database is keyword searchable.