- Professor: Ross Lerner
From Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, this course will investigate canonical works of British literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We will read across genres, from philosophical treatises to lyrical poetry, with an eye toward breadth rather than completeness. That said, we will look at a sampling of classic texts which are, I believe, useful to know for anyone planning to continue studying literature, whether that is next semester or in graduate school. To that end, we will be approaching these texts with consideration to both their historical contexts and recent critical discourses.
To put these disparate literary genres and periods into the same conversation, this course will consider most of the assigned texts as works engaged in a depiction of “monstrosity.” These monstrous subjects might be scientific, cultural, or political. They might be literal or figurative, seemingly human or grotesquely shaped. As we read, we will consider the way a text’s monster or monsters resonate with the cultural fears and anxieties of its era. How does Gulliver’s position within a global empire shape his view of strange cultures and their inhabitants? In what way does Mr. Hyde embody desires condemned by proper Victorian society? We will especially consider how monsters symbolize deviations from cultural norms and even herald the acceptance of once-transgressive bodies, behaviors, and identities. We will determine the role of monstrosity in the British literary imagination of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and, along the way, we will also interrogate our own impulses to label something monstrous.
To put these disparate literary genres and periods into the same conversation, this course will consider most of the assigned texts as works engaged in a depiction of “monstrosity.” These monstrous subjects might be scientific, cultural, or political. They might be literal or figurative, seemingly human or grotesquely shaped. As we read, we will consider the way a text’s monster or monsters resonate with the cultural fears and anxieties of its era. How does Gulliver’s position within a global empire shape his view of strange cultures and their inhabitants? In what way does Mr. Hyde embody desires condemned by proper Victorian society? We will especially consider how monsters symbolize deviations from cultural norms and even herald the acceptance of once-transgressive bodies, behaviors, and identities. We will determine the role of monstrosity in the British literary imagination of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and, along the way, we will also interrogate our own impulses to label something monstrous.
- Professor: Zachary Mann
- Professor: Leila Neti