Fall 2018 - ENGL 833 G100

Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature (4)

Class Number: 4684

Delivery Method: In Person

Overview

  • Course Times + Location:

    Sep 4 – Dec 3, 2018: Wed, 1:30–5:20 p.m.
    Burnaby

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Examines selected nineteenth-century works in a variety of genres organized by cultural movements, critical issues, or theoretical approaches. May include works in a variety of media and from diverse geopolitical regions.

COURSE DETAILS:

Reading Victorian Environments

“Nature never did betray/The heart that loved her”  -- William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey (1798)
“Nature, red in tooth and claw/…shriek’d against [God’s ] creed”  -- Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850)  
“By the plague-wind every breath of air you draw is polluted, half round the world”  --John Ruskin, “Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century” (1884)              

This course examines diverse environments, both natural and human-made, imagined in a selection of Victorian metropolitan and colonial writing. In the final decades of the Victorian period, geologist Antonio Stoppani recognized the human impacts on the biosphere were of such magnitude that they constituted an era of their own, the Anthropozoic era. Attempts to grapple with rapid ecological transformation wrought by industrial progress during the 19th c clearly anticipate current debates surrounding the Anthropocene, the recently proposed name for the geological epoch dominated by human influence on the earth’s climate and environment.
           
With this in mind, we will consider how our selected Victorian texts convey awareness of human activity as a transformative force comparable to the larger forces of nature. And we will trace a developing cognitive climate about environmental change suggested through emergent narratives, new literary forms, and print formats, representing such concerns as climate change, the rapid growth of cities, species extinctions, deforestation, and migrations of populations. And we will do so in terms of processes set in motion, or intensified, in the nineteenth century, when extraordinary expansions of industrial technology and the worldwide web of communication forged ever tighter links between the geographic center of British Empire - England and London - and peripheries like South Africa, central Canada and British Columbia. We will explore some of the ways Victorian writers already understood the idea of nature to be inextricable from culture and intricately bound up with colonial power. We will reflect along with them on what nature, including human nature, was and is - and, indeed, what new natures may be. We will engage the period’s forceful literary commentaries on industrial and colonial practices and consequences together with no less affecting indirect expressions of unspecified mourning, unaccountable loss, and widespread crisis connected with the idea of nature. Most importantly, we will ask why and how these formulations matter today.            

Readings will include both metropolitan writings (e.g. Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and George Gissing’s New Grub Street and selected poetry of William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold) and colonial perspectives (e.g. Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm and selections from Anna Jameson, William Wilfred Campbell and E. Pauline Johnson). Our classroom reading environment will be critically and theoretically informed each week by scholarship representing relevant debates and key issues in environmental studies, book history and media studies, colonial and postcolonial studies.

Grading

  • Participation 10%
  • Three Short Critical Response Papers (1,000 words), to be presented seminar-style 45%
  • Final Paper (15-18 pages), including proposal (max 500 words) 45%

NOTES:

  • To facilitate our study of the material reading environments of Victorian print culture the majority of seminars will take place in SFU Library's Special Collections.
  • SFU Professor Carole Gerson will give a guest lecture on the fascinating publication history of E. Pauline Johnson's Legends of Vancouver.

REQUIREMENTS:

  • 10% Participation
  • 45% Three Short Critical Response Papers (1,000 words), to be presented seminar-style
  • 45% Final Paper (15-18 pages), including proposal (max 500 words)
  • Attendance is required

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

Apart from the novels, readings, both primary and critical, will be available on Canvas. Students can purchase an edition of the novels in advance of classes.

REQUIRED READING:

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, Norton, Fourth edition
ISBN: 0393264874

George Gissing, New Grub Street, Penguin
ISBN: 0140430326

Oliver Schreiner, Story of An African Farm, Broadview
ISBN: 1551112868

Graduate Studies Notes:

Important dates and deadlines for graduate students are found here: http://www.sfu.ca/dean-gradstudies/current/important_dates/guidelines.html. The deadline to drop a course with a 100% refund is the end of week 2. The deadline to drop with no notation on your transcript is the end of week 3.

Registrar Notes:

SFU’s Academic Integrity web site http://students.sfu.ca/academicintegrity.html is filled with information on what is meant by academic dishonesty, where you can find resources to help with your studies and the consequences of cheating.  Check out the site for more information and videos that help explain the issues in plain English.

Each student is responsible for his or her conduct as it affects the University community.  Academic dishonesty, in whatever form, is ultimately destructive of the values of the University. Furthermore, it is unfair and discouraging to the majority of students who pursue their studies honestly. Scholarly integrity is required of all members of the University. http://www.sfu.ca/policies/gazette/student/s10-01.html

ACADEMIC INTEGRITY: YOUR WORK, YOUR SUCCESS