485 W20 Lawson

485

We acknowledge that we are living and working on the traditional territory of the Attawandaron (Neutral), Anishnaabeg, and Haudenosaunee peoples. The University of Waterloo is situated on the Haldimand Tract, land promised and given to Six Nations, which includes six miles on each side of the Grand River.

ENGLISH 485

ENGL 485 Topics in Literatures Romantic to Modern: Bleak House, Bleak world

Winter 2020: Mon and Wed 2:30-3:50 in SJ1 2009

Professor Kate Lawson klawson@uwaterloo.ca

Student hours/office hours: Tues and Wed 1:15-2:00 pm

519-888-4567 ext. 33965 Hagey Hall 264

TEXTS:

All students are required to have a printed copy of Bleak House. All other readings will be posted on Learn.

Charles Dickens, Bleak House. Oxford World’s Classics Edition, Ed. Stephen Gill. (Other editions of the novels are acceptable.)

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

This course focusses on Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, a novel published in twenty monthly parts:

In the course, we will try to mimic the Victorian reading experience by reading and discussing two of the original monthly installments (“numbers”) each week for ten weeks.

One of Dickens’ most important novels, Bleak House begins in the infamous court of Chancery—a London law court that deals with a variety of matters including wills, adoptions, custody, and guardianships—and then radiates out to include slums and country houses, street sweepers and baronets, romance and murder. The novel has two narrators, a present-tense, third-person narrator and a retrospective first-person narrator—a young woman named Esther Summerson.

We will consider how our interpretative habits and strategies change when we read a novel over ten weeks. We will also discuss topics such as the novel’s representation of law and bureaucracy; family and family history; class; gender; illness and disability; politics and reform; and sentiment.

In addition, we will read other material from the Victorian period to contextualize Bleak House, along with some relevant literary and cultural criticism.

Course Learning Objectives:

• to acquire a knowledge of British history and literary history of the 1850s;
• to increase critical responsiveness to the formal aspects of the novel and to realism as a mode;
• to understand serial publication, and the importance of this mode of publication in social history;
• to critically assess ideas in social and cultural criticism;
• to identify and evaluate important themes and the interrelations between the literary works and the cultural concerns of the period;
• to increase critical awareness of the relations between the formal / aesthetic and the intellectual, ethical, and social;
• to hone critical skills in the reading, analysis, interpretation, and evaluation of texts;
• to enhance written and oral communication skills.

LATE POLICY:

Essays are due on the dates assigned above. Please email or speak to me regarding extensions. Late penalty: 2 marks per day deducted.

Format: Please post your reading diary entries on Learn. Please hand in a paper copy of the other two assignments. You may give them to me in class, or use the English department essay drop box on the second floor of Hagey Hall (make sure my name is on the assignment as well as yours).

You must read the required chapters of Bleak House for each Monday class—but don’t skip ahead! We will be discussing the specified chapters in detail, so make notes, underline important sections, use highlighter, sticky notes, whatever you find best to track your reactions/questions to the text as you read.

This class relies on group discussion. Please attend, be prepared for, and contribute to every class.

In discussions, I hope that you will be both an independent thinker and a collaborative voice. Often the best discussions include students taking risks in stating their ideas, so please respond respectfully and thoughtfully whether you agree or disagree with someone else.

READING DIARY 15% Mondays by noon, Jan. 13-Mar. 23 For 8 out of 10 weeks, post on Learn a 200-250 word critical reflection on that week’s chapters from Bleak House. You may comment on whatever interested you (e.g. a character, a twist in the plot, a description, an image, an illustration, etc.), whatever surprised you, whatever bored you, etc. Provide relevant page (or chapter) numbers in your post. Please read posts by your fellow students to prepare for class discussion.

Posts will not be individually graded; you will receive 2% per post, if you post an appropriate critical reflection on Learn by the due date/time.

RESPONSE PAPER or REMEDIATION EXERCISE    30%                    February 3

RESPONSE PAPER (750-1000 words)

Provide a close reading of a section of Bleak House. Choose a very short section of the novel that you find particularly interesting; it could be a word, a description of a thing or a character, a brief conversation, a conflict, a landscape, an allusion, a metaphor, etc. Because close reading is a foundational skills in the construction of a larger argument, you may want to try out ideas that you could develop further in your final paper.

Suggestions for getting started on a close reading: What does the passage say? Paraphrase it. How does it say it? Why does it say it like that? What is it doing in the novel as a whole? Now go back to the first question—“What does it say?”—and see if you have a different answer.

Why did this section catch your attention? What is strange here? Why were these specific words chosen?

Please indicate page number and chapter number when you refer to the text. Please do not use secondary sources; but if you do choose to use secondary sources, provide citations and a Works Cited.

OR

REMEDIATION EXERCISE

(See Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation. Assignment adapted from Nathan K. Hensley, Georgetown University; author of Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty, 2016.)

Part 1: paragraph / “translation”:

Faithfully translate a paragraph from Bleak House into a new medium: a) pick a paragraph (or a scene of dialogue) in the novel; b) choose a destination medium (video, text message, Twitter, Facebook, poetry, drama, painting, sculpture, etc.); c) translate.

Part 2: 600-750 word reflection essay:

Critically reflect on what is lost and gained in your “translation”; what are the affordances of each medium? What did you learn about the novel form by doing a translation? What specific decisions did you make and why did you make them?

ESSAY (2500-3000 words)                                                 45%                     April 3

Essay topics will be handed out in advance of the due date, but you are also encouraged to develop your own topic. The essay is due on April 3 but you are welcome to hand it in early.

I urge you to begin working on the essay in late February or early March and to develop a working thesis and a draft of the first paragraph to share with me, either in my office hours or by email. I hope that feedback early in the process will result in a stronger final essay.

Essay format

• 12-point font; 1”/2.5 cm. margins;
• double-spaced;
• printing on two sides of the page is acceptable;
• a word count at the end of the document;
• MLA format; see Owl at Purdue for information on MLA
• A title that names the work(s) under discussion and indicates your approach to the topic.

Professor K. Lawson

SCHEDULE ENGLISH 485

Winter 2020, Mon and Wed 11:30-12:50, HH 138

WEEK 1 January 6-8: introductions; introduction to the course; Dickens, Serial publication; the 1850s; realism

Charity, Africa

Excerpt from Nasser Mufti. Civilizing War: Imperial Politics and the Poetics of National Rupture.

Master narratives [Chapter 3: “... Jarndyce and Jarndyce—the—a—in itself a monument of Chancery practice. In which (I would say) every difficulty, every contingency, every masterly fiction, every form of procedure known in that court, is represented over and over again...”]

Labour

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “The Cry of the Children”

Henry Mayhew, “Boy Crossing-Sweepers and Tumblers,” London Labour and the London Poor

Law

Kafka, “Before the Law”

Excerpt from Amanda Anderson, Bleak Liberalism

***Close Reading or Remediation exercise due

Poverty

Excerpt from Engels, “The Great Towns,” The Condition of the Working Class in England (read from the beginning of the chapter to “Let us leave London and …”)

The fictional world

Excerpt from Elaine Auyoung, “Standing Outside Bleak House”

Excerpt from Jesse Oak Taylor, “The Novel as Climate Model”

****February 17-21: Reading Week, no classes *****

Connections and disconnections

Map of The Bleak House world

John Snow’s cholera map

Excerpt from Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present

Excerpt from Ian Duncan, “Realism” (“common humanity” “nothing in common with each other”) [Optional reading: John Snow, “On the Mode of Communication of Cholera” 1849]

Wed March 11: Class visit: Dr. Mike Lesiuk. Excerpts from J. Hillis Miller; Umberto Eco, Thomas

A. Sebeok, The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce; Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (to be posted on Learn)

Excerpt from Robin Warhol. ‘AND DYING THUS AROUND US EVERY DAY,’ Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel

Marriage

Matthew Arnold, “The Buried Life”

Excerpts from J. Hillis Miller, “Moments of Decision in Bleak House”

Excerpts from John O. Jordan, Supposing Bleak House

Excerpt from Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading”

WEEK 12 March 30-April 1: review, summing up, looking back