8:158 Victorian Fiction: Assignments
T Th 5:00-6:15, Room 206 EPB
Instructor: Florence Boos florence-boos@uiowa.edu
http://www.uiowa.edu~boosf/2014VictFict158/index.html
Office: 319 EPB, office phone 335-0434 (answering machine)
Office hours: T Th 2-3:30, most evenings after class until 7 p. m.; Fridays 4:30-5:30 p. m. and Wednesday afternoons by appointment
Materials and Textbooks:
Handouts for stories by George Egerton, "Gone Under" and Margaret Oliphant
Texts in UI Bookstore:
Elizabet Gaskell, Mary Barton
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
Charlotte Bronte, Villette
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Richard Jeffries, After London
Course Requirements:
1. Reading responses: Before each class period, please send to me by e-mail/ICON a reading response. This should answer the questions:
Was there any section of the reading which wasn't clear to you or which seemed difficult?
Comment on a character/passage/element of the reading which you think especially interesting or notable. (2 or 3 sentences is sufficient.)
Why may the writer have created this poem/set of passages/argument/segment of the novel? In other words, if this is not a complete work, what purpose is served by including the part we have read? If a complete work, how are we expected to respond? (1 or more sentences will be sufficient.)
2, attendance and class discussion: please read the assignment carefully and come prepared to ask questions and comment on unusual features of the text.
3. short biographies: From time to time, I will ask students to prepare background information on an author's life.
4. shared project: with two others, please prepare a joint presentation on some aspect of a text or topic studied for the course. These might take the form of a dramatic reading; a powerpoint presentation; a skit or poem, a website; a series of songs placed in context; a dance demonstration; an informative lecture, or any other mode of presentation you prefer. At the time of the presentation or by the following class period, each member of the group should also submit a 2 page essay placing the project in context and explaining his or her contribution to the result. Please let me know sometime in February what you have decided to do.
For example, a presentation on Mary Barton might consider the songs interspersed in the text and other similar oral working-class songs of the period, working-conditions for seamstresses, the Chartist movement, or other industrial novels of the 1840s; one on The Tale of Two Cities might consider interpretations of the French Revolution, including Thomas Carlyle's history and other, later interpretations, biographical reasons for Charles Dickens's identification with the topic; one on Villette might consider Bronte's letters from the period of her residence in Belgium, critical responses to the novel, her relationship with publishers, or British attitudes toward Catholicism and/or France and Belgium. For Middlemarch, a project might consider medical practices in the early Victorian period, model villages and other forms of Victorian philanthropy, the figure of "Sister Dora" as the basis for Dorothea, the class system of the time as represented in the novel, linguistic registers and use of dialect, contemporary critical responses to Eliot's novel, or a selection of 20th and 21st century critical readings.
5. essays: You will be asked to write a six-page research paper utilizing several library sources, as well as a final six-page comparative essay/final exam. I will hand out some guidelines and suggested topics for the research paper, which is due Friday 7 March 2014. If you give me a draft of your paper a week before it's due, I will give you suggestions for revision.
6. Final essay: You will be asked to present a precis of the substance of your final essay in class 13 May 2014 or at another agreed-upon time during exam week. By this date you should have prepared a first draft; the final draft will be due Friday 16 May 2014.
Rough Guide to Grading Criteria:
10 points Reading Responses
10 points Attendance and discussion
10 points Group presentation
20 points tests
24 points first essay
26 points second essay
---------------------------
8:158 Victorian Fiction
Please submit an essay placing one of the texts we have read within a broader context. Your essay should be based in part on research, using at least 5 sources (biographies, history, critical essays). A title and bibliography are due Thursday 6 March 2014, an outline Tuesday 10 March 2014, and the essay Friday 14 March 2014.
The Role of the Community in Mary Barton
The Significance of Popular Songs and Dialect in Mary Barton
Law, Police and Detection in Mary Barton
Mary Barton as a Tale of Manchester Life (could be based in part on Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class)
Social Classes in Mary Barton (or in Mary Barton and The Mill on the Floss)
Authorial Presence in Mary Barton
The Development of Female Identity in Mary Barton (the female bildungroman)
The Significance of Esther in Mary Barton
Family Violence and Addiction in Mary Barton
Mary and Her Friends: The Role of Sally, Alice, Job and Margaret in the Heroine’s
Development in Mary Barton
Ethics and Religion in Mary Barton
The Narrator in Villette
Secrets, Disguises, and Mysteries as Structuring Devices in Villette
Dreams, Symbols and Nightmares in Villette
The Use of Doubles in Villette
Art and Dramatic Performance in Villette
The Relationship of Subplots in David Copperfield
Autobiographical Themes in David Copperfield
The Contemporary Reception of David Copperfield
The Role of Illustrations in DC
Serialization and the Structure of DC/ The Design of Chapters and Books in DC
DC as a Satire of Contemporary Victorian Society
Humor/the Grotesque/The Use of Contrast in DC; Disability in DC; Caricature (e. g. Uriah Heep)
Family Relationships in DC; Courtship and Marriage in DC
DC/Middlemarch as a Bildungsroman
The Narrator in Middlemarch (could be subdivided)
Beginnings and Endings in Middlemarch (structure of books, chapters, plots)
Interconnected Plots/Relationships in Middlemarch
Money and Morality in Middlemarch
St. Teresa and the Man of Science: Parallel Plots in Middlemarch
Provincial Politics in Middlemarch
The Death of Featherstone and its Aftermath
Art and the World of Culture in Middlemarch
The Double Marriage Plot: Causabon and Ladislaw
Moral Development in Middlemarch
The Search for Vocation in Middlemarch
Marriage as an Ideal in George Eliot’s Middlemarch