ENGL 330(F) Victorian Relativity

Is everything relative? Absolutely. Did it always use to be? Well, that depends. It depended a lot, during the nineteenth century, on the literary imagination as it gave shape to new cultural forms. The dramatic monologue, the split-level or skew-narrated novel, children's and social-science fiction, philosophical dialogue were literary modes that, steeped in ambivalence over headlong capitalism and emergent democracy, exercised the Victorian mind in such habits of thought as Darwin's radical ecology presupposed and Einstein's equations codified. We'll sample the genres just named in fictions by James Hogg, Emily Brontė, Herman Melville, R. L. Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Henry James; poems by Tennyson, the Brownings, the Rossettis, Augusta Webster; essays by J. S. Mill, Darwin, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde. Students will write essays of their own, of course, and have a turn at guiding class discussion. In addition, we'll also take a more or less deep plunge into IVANHOE: not the Scott novel, but a digital game for multiple players, based on a mainframe at my home institution in Virginia, that's all about textual manipulation and offers a relativizing education in itself.
Format: discussion. Requirements: two short (4-5 pages) and one long (10-12 pages) papers, and participation in IVANHOE.
Prerequisites: 100-level English course, except 150. Enrollment limit: 25 (expected: 20). Preference given to English majors.
(1700-1900)

Hour: TUCKER