ENG 462 - Seminar: A: Romantic Radicalism or B: The Long Eighteenth Century Gothic

462I Gossip
 

Instructor
Fackler

Gossip, long an object of serious investigation in the social and life sciences, has only begun in the past few years to receive similarly serious attention in the humanities. Given the recent publication of major critical works that focus on the interpenetrations of gossip, literature, and culture, ours is an auspicious and important moment at which to revisit, expand upon, and complicate Patricia Meyer Spacks’s claim that gossip constitutes a species of “drama” in which interlocutors “[speak] the language of shared experience, [reveal] themselves as they talk of others, [and construct] a joint narrative-a narrative that conjures up yet other actors, offstage, playing out their own private dramas.” A recent article in The New York Times declared, “Long-term studies of Pacific Islanders, American middle-school children and residents of rural Newfoundland and Mexico, among others, have confirmed that the content and frequency of gossip are universal.” This seminar proceeds from the alternative position that gossip must be historicized for its changing purposes, routes of circulation, and impact to be understood properly. The course will be transatlantic and transhistorical in its focus, and will draw on cultural studies and performance studies for its methodology and mode(s) of critical inquiry. In turning to twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultures, we will investigate the role gossip plays in literature, psychoanalysis, journalism, politics, television, and film. Throughout the course we will foreground the imbrication of gossip and scandal with constructions of gender and sexuality.

Satisfies the Innovation requirement for the English major.

462A Romantic Radicalism

Instructor
Vaz

For William Godwin, truth, if it exists, comes about in the “collision of mind with mind.”  In this seminar, we will investigate and interrogate how Romantic literature manifests this “collision” by creating and participating in the aesthetic, economic, and socio-political tectonic shifts of the period.  By doing so, we will examine how Romantic literature intersects with the richness and complexity of the period’s radical and revolutionary thought.

Satisfies the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major.

462B The Long Eighteeth Century Gothic

lnstructor
Vaz
There’s nothing like reading books we’ve been told we ought not read. That’s essentially the story of the Gothic during its inception. Lambasted by contemporary critics as literature’s illegitimate and sinful child, gothic novels nonetheless sold like hotcakes, and the infection easily spread to poetry and drama. In our seminar, we will trace this phenomenon in England from the 1760s through the Romantic period to study its evolution from bastard child in the eighteenth century to literature worthy of scholarship in the last 30 years of the twentieth century.

Satisfies the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major.