Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Explores texts in relation to their different material forms, including oral, manuscript, print, film, and digital media. May be further organized by methodology (e.g. book history, textual scholarship, media studies, adaptation studies, digital humanities), historical period, or genre. Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

The Eighteenth Century in Contemporary Cultural Memory: From 'Burns Night' to 'Bridgerton'

This course introduces students to Cultural Memory Studies in order to consider how and why the memory of the eighteenth century continues to live on in the literary and popular culture of the present moment. We will examine several different case studies that provide examples of the ways in which the eighteenth century is currently being re-presented: contemporary “Burns Night” celebrations of the poet Robert Burns, including Vancouver's own Gung Haggis Fat Choy celebration; the 2020 film Emma which director Autumn de Wilde based on Jane Austen’s 1815 novel; and Esi Edugyan’s novel Washington Black, which has many parallels to The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano (1789), the first published account by a black writer who was formerly enslaved. We finish by taking a brief foray into Bridgerton, the successful Netflix series that first aired in 2020 . In each case, we read and analyze the original eighteenth-century texts and contexts behind these works, examining how they are reiterated, reused and/or reinterpreted in the present, often to address questions of gender, class and race. What is it about the eighteenth century—or about how we perceive it—that remains pertinent and compelling to us now? 

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

-analyze the representation of the eighteenth century in the present, employing Cultural Memory Theory
-analyze a variety of literary and popular texts from the long eighteenth century, paying attention to the cultural contexts in which they were produced
-develop communications skills (written and oral) and critical thinking skills

Grading

Materials

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