Overview

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:

Unsettling Victorian Literature

In this course, we will identify basic assumptions about what Victorian literature is and why we study it today. While our initial discussion will focus on “what” is Victorian, we will quickly move to “where,” and “when,” is Victorian. Is Victorian somewhere in the past and far away in England or is it still thriving in some forms today? In what ways might we ourselves be Victorian? Is Victorian still necessary or relevant?

We will begin to answer these questions by thinking together about where and who we are when we study Victorian literature. As part of this process, we will engage perspectives that have conventionally been invisible in the field of Victorian Studies, such as intersections of racialized, settler colonial and environmental awareness in Victorian literature. In this way, we will work toward recovering the historical experiences of Indigenous peoples in predominantly white settler nations that emerged during the nineteenth century, attending to processes and effects of dispossession and violence entailed in colonialism, and questioning ongoing tendencies toward disavowal or conceptual displacement of this history. Our focus will shift from metropolitan, imperial culture to Indigenous and settler perspectives. Our approach will be comparative, looking at historical relationships between nature and society across global geo-political spaces. And our method will be disruptive, upending the standard, linear cultural history by reading contemporary literature, such as Tomson Highway’s (Cree) play The Rez Sisters (1988), that writes back to the colonial consolidation of the Victorian period.

The first weeks of the course will engage Victorian literature and culture through a settler colonial, Indigenous, and ecocritical lens by studying a canon linked to the remote region of northern England (the English Lake District, now a national park and a UNESCO world heritage site) made famous in the nineteenth century by the nature poet William Wordsworth. This canon of literature functions within a centre/periphery, local/global geo-cultural framework that will help us identify and disrupt colonial paradigms. The remainder of the course will study literature from colonial societies by and about settlers and Indigenous peoples, including Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm; selections from Anna Jameson’s Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada; Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s (Ojibwe) poetry and oral transcriptions; Black emigrant, Mary Ann Shadd’s pamphlet A Plea for Emigration; and E. Pauline Johnson’s (Kanien'kehá:ka) poetry and Legends of Vancouver.

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

Five of our books are available from Broadview Press. I recommend that you order directly from the press to get the best rate. Tomson Highway's The Rez Sisters can be ordered directly from Fifth House or through a local bookstore, such as Iron Dog or Massey Books. All other readings will be available on the Engl 833 Canvas website.

REQUIRED READING: