Outlines
Week 15
Looking back, summing up, opening out: what is the relation between the canon, the syllabus, the archive, and the novel?
Week 14
“This metaphoric suspension [of closure in book VII] constitutes a kind of narrative suspense, an unresolved harmony that keeps “mysterious tune” with the sacramental cosmic processiveness Aurora has invoked in book 5. It also places in epic perspective the novelistic realism that ostensibly superintends the final two books.” (Tucker pg. 79)
Week 14
“This metaphoric suspension [of closure in book VII] constitutes a kind of narrative suspense, an unresolved harmony that keeps “mysterious tune” with the sacramental cosmic processiveness Aurora has invoked in book 5. It also places in epic perspective the novelistic realism that ostensibly superintends the final two books.” (Tucker pg. 79)
Week 13
“It is clear, I hope, that my concern with authority does not entail analysis of what lies hidden in the Orientalist text, but analysis rather of the text’s surface, its exteriority to what it describes.” (Said, Orientalism p. 20)
Week 12
Paratextual material maps out the margins of Middlemarch. Divided into eight books and eighty-six chapters, and bookended by a prelude and a finale, the novel itself contains a plethora of classificatory forms and organizational schemata. Among these ordering principles, the collected epigraphs and “mottos” that preface each chapter serve as paratextual synopsis (Sierra’s seminar paper, 2).
Week 12
Paratextual material maps out the margins of Middlemarch. Divided into eight books and eighty-six chapters, and bookended by a prelude and a finale, the novel itself contains a plethora of classificatory forms and organizational schemata. Among these ordering principles, the collected epigraphs and “mottos” that preface each chapter serve as paratextual synopsis (Sierra’s seminar paper, 2).
Week 10
Some have argued that Daniel Deronda IS a “silly novel,” but is The Mill on the Floss a reparative reading of “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”?
Week 7
I too well remember a time – a long time, of cold, of danger, of contention. To this hour, when I have the nightmare, it repeats the rush and saltness of briny waves in my throat, and their icy pressure on my lungs. I even know there was a storm, and that not of one hour nor one day. For many days and nights neither sun nor stars appeared; we cast with our own hands the tackling out of the ship; a heavy tempest lay on us; all hope that we should be saved was taken away. In fine, the ship was lost, the crew perished. (Villette, 39).
Week 7
I too well remember a time – a long time, of cold, of danger, of contention. To this hour, when I have the nightmare, it repeats the rush and saltness of briny waves in my throat, and their icy pressure on my lungs. I even know there was a storm, and that not of one hour nor one day. For many days and nights neither sun nor stars appeared; we cast with our own hands the tackling out of the ship; a heavy tempest lay on us; all hope that we should be saved was taken away. In fine, the ship was lost, the crew perished. (Villette, 39).
Week 5
“Thus as any given moment of its historical existence, language is a heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past […]” (Bakhtin 291)
Week 5
“Thus as any given moment of its historical existence, language is a heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past […]” (Bakhtin 291)
Week 4
Cathy’s paper: What happens when the narrator in question is supposedly representing the actual story of the author, not ‘fiction?’ Is the authorial intent still relevant in interpreting the work? Reading Oliphant’s autobiography, a reader is presented with numerous instances that seem to question the supposed divide between the author and the narrator or internal evidence versus external evidence.
Week 4
Cathy’s paper: What happens when the narrator in question is supposedly representing the actual story of the author, not ‘fiction?’ Is the authorial intent still relevant in interpreting the work? Reading Oliphant’s autobiography, a reader is presented with numerous instances that seem to question the supposed divide between the author and the narrator or internal evidence versus external evidence.
Week 3
Without even realizing it, we amble like Ursula around campus or in the city, surrounded by sensation (‘reality’) yet caught up in those “castles in the air” which, for Victorian novelists like Trollope and Oliphant, are at once the birthplace and reification of the realist narrative. This concern for the practical effects of realism on our everyday experience and even our identity construction still pervades much of our lives but, like Ursula, we frequently overlook it. The reading of Victorian realist novels can help re-sensitize us to this narrative mode which has become so essential to how we internally negotiate our own experience. (Alison’s Week 3 seminar paper.)
Week 3
Without even realizing it, we amble like Ursula around campus or in the city, surrounded by sensation (‘reality’) yet caught up in those “castles in the air” which, for Victorian novelists like Trollope and Oliphant, are at once the birthplace and reification of the realist narrative. This concern for the practical effects of realism on our everyday experience and even our identity construction still pervades much of our lives but, like Ursula, we frequently overlook it. The reading of Victorian realist novels can help re-sensitize us to this narrative mode which has become so essential to how we internally negotiate our own experience. (Alison’s Week 3 seminar paper.)