Lectures in Victorian Literature and Culture – 2nd year English minor – 2014

Reader Ioana Zirra

Seminar instructors: Daniela Carstea, Ilinca Stroe, Martin Potter, Ioana Zirra

Lectures 1, 2 and 3: Module One: The Victorian Middle Class SocietyLecture One: Hard Core Data (enduring labels regarding Politics, the Social, Natural and Cultural Environment- the political and cultural meanings of the word “liberal” in the nineteenth century see (Contributions I, 9-13) (a);

Module One, Lecture Two: Competing Insider Views on the Victorian Age: Upper Middle-Class Leisure and Pleasure (in The Prologue to Alfred Tennyson’s “The Princess” versus Their Puritanical Challenge (in Thomas Carlyle’s “The Everlasting Yea”, from Sartor Resartus Contributions I, 58-59; the consequent doctrine of activism in Past and Present (1843) “Labour”); Carlyle’s further challenges: his accusation to the laissez-faire society in Chartism (1841) and Past and Present (1843): Gospel of Mammonism, Captains of Industry, the chapters on LaissezFaire and Not Laissez Faire "Labour" Past and Present , chapter XI (Contributions I, 2011, 60-62) (b);

Module One, Lecture Three: Democracy Challenged by Carlyle (in Past and Present (Chapter XI: “Democracy”) and Taught by John Stuart Mill (in “Bentham", "Coleridge" and On Liberty - chapters II and III see also Contributions I, 88-89): The Passage from Tantrum to Deliberative Prose in the Victorian Essay; understanding the new liberal paradigm as a conception with rational principles and practices (Contributions I, 92-94 and 95-96) (c).

Lecture 4: Module Two: The Victorian Novel (I): Early Victorian novelists - Dickens and Thackeray and the fashionable kinds of fiction in the nineteenth century; Vanity Fair as the swan song of the dominant genteel mentality and the literary force of Dickens's imagination; his sentimental and satirical genteel mentality emblems presented through character definitions from Our Mutual Friend (1854) and Bleak House (1852) [the Veneerings, Podsnappery, Boffin’s Bower] Bleak House (1852) [Telescopic philanthropy; deportment] (Contributions I, Appendix, 137-140

Lecture 5 Module Three: Victorian Poetry (I) Lord Alfred Tennyson and Matthew Arnold as paramount Early and Mid-Victorian Poets (Contributions I, 40-50 and 54-55); (Contributions II, 9-14 and 39-41)

Lecture 6 Module Three: Victorian Poetry (II) Oblique Poetry and the Dramatic Monologue Species: Irony and Idealism in Robert Browning the Scandal Monger (Contributions I, 81-87)

Lecture 7: Module Two: The Victorian Novel (II): The Art of Victorian Feminine Fiction in Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Middlemarch plus Silas Marner as a masterpiece in little (Contributions I, 64-75)

Lectures 8, 9, 10, 11 : Module Four- the Sequence of Early, Mid- and Late Victorian Positive and Negative Creeds(in Poetry, in the Essays on Education

(I) Revivals and Contestations of Traditional Faith: The Oxford Movement and John Henry Newman; Gerard Manley Hopkins “The Windhover”, “No Worst, There Is None” versus the dismissal of Christianity in Algernon Charles Swinburne’s pessimistic aestheticism in “Hymn to Prosepine” (Contributions II, 38-39) and Thomas Henry Huxley and Agnosticism

(II) Cultural Creeds and Credentials of the Victorian Age ( Thomas Carlyle’s campaign against scepticism in “On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History – “The Hero as Man of Letters” and the religion of culture continued in Matthew Arnold’s Essays on Criticism, the First and the Second Series (Contributions I, 125-128); Algernon Charles Swinburne’s pessimist and aestheticist contestation of Christianity in “Hymn to Prosepine”

(III) The Aims of Education in the Old and the New Liberal Paradigms: John

Henry Newman’s discrimination between education and instruction (Contributions I, p. 92-94); Thomas Henry Huxley’s dismissal of classical humanist education as the palaeontology of man; Matthew Arnold’s Puritanical Revival of the Enlightenment Man’s Faculties (Contributions I, 94-95); Oscar Wilde’s and George Bernard Shaw’s Brands of Socialist Education in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” and “Major Barbara”

(IV) The Aesthetic Critics’ Creed and Practice: Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the RenaissanceMarius the Epicurean(Contributions I, 134-135), and Oscar Wilde’s dandy masks in The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Importance of Being Earnest (Contributions II, 70-76). Species of Drama in the Victorian canon: Oscar Wilde’s and George Bernard Shaw’s well-made plays The Importance of Being Earnest and Major Barbara (Contributions II, 86-99)

Lecture 12: Module Three: The Victorian Novel (III) The Swan Song and Demise of Victorian Realism - Thomas Hardy’s Fiction and Late Victorian Fantasies (Contributions I, 101-110)

The bibliography for the English Major students comprises all the Victorian titles and handbook excerpts discussed in the lectures, following the format of the Exam Bibliography at the end of Contributions I (159-165) and being able to identify the place of each text/title/author in the overall economy of the Victorian age. The minimum requirement is that students read attentively in English, pen in hand and negotiating the meanings taught in the lectures the following: 5 Victorian fiction titles, 12 poems by the protagonists of each of the poetry lectures, two plays and four whole essays (one by Carlyle, one by Mill, one by Matthew Arnold, one by Walter Pater).

The bibliography for the English Minor students includes all the matter discussed in the lectures, with the further obligation of making proof that three titles from the Victorian fiction bibliography ( as specified at the end of Contributions I) have been read in full and in detail – in English, with reading notes, two plays (not just the excerpts analysed in the last Reconstruction of Contributions II) and six full poems for each of the poetry lectures (two for each of the poetry lectures taught).

FURTHER STUDENT OBLIGATIONS

-Students shall have ready for presentation to the lecturer and seminar instructors during the semester and at the exam their personal English word and text explanations, their own anthologies of text-excerpts or poems copied manu propria. The pronunciations and translation of the words taken down will be verified periodically and no student can take the final exam in the absence of a personal portfolio of words, conspectuses (not summaries from the internet!), concepts, chronologies, etc.

Calculating the final grade: In case it is a passing grade, the seminar will count as one third of the final grade in Victorian Literature and Culture. Conversely, if the final exam score is not a passing one, the seminar grade will have no contribution to securing the pass– but it will be taken into consideration the next time a student takes the Victorian Literature and Culture Exam in order to obtain the passing score.

Seminar attendance is obligatory in a 75 per cent proportion. Students who do not have enough presences at the seminar, or whose seminar grades are not passing ones, are barred from taking the final exam.

Pool of Bibliographical Titles

Fiction: Dickens: Great Expectations; Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights; Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre; Thomas Hardy : Jude the Obscure; Lewis Carrol: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray;

The Essay: John Henry Newman: The Idea of a University – Knowledge Its Own End ; John Stuart Mill – On Liberty (excerpts from Chapters II and III); Walter Pater: Studies in the History of the Renaissance –The Preface; Conclusion(excerpts); Oscar Wilde – Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray

Drama: Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest; George Bernard Shaw: Major Barbara

The poems analyzed in the lectures and the seminars by Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, Algernon Charles Swinburne , Gerard Manley Hopkins