English 630; Laura
Mandell
Spring, 1996; Tues. 1:00 to 3:40
In this course, we will examine the emergence of distinctively modern forms of subjectivity by looking at what kinds of new oppositions, emerging with the advent of capitalism and the rise of the middle class, get mapped onto the opposition masculine/feminine. That is, we will examine how gender distinctions are used to pry apart the public and the private, production and consumption, the socioeconomic and the aesthetic into separate realms. We want to examine not only how these domains get constructed as separate, but also how transfers between them occur through representations of them: that is, we will be looking for the way distinctions between kinds of experience and knowledge are made, and also at how they are figuratively bridged. In short, we will track the emergence of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity.
In addition, we will think about agency. On the one hand, the novel constructs a sense of interiority from which political and social concerns are excluded as a focus of attention and included as unconscious contents. It creates a picture of human agency as crossed or even thwarted by unconscious desires and ideologies poised to coopt any resistance to them. But on the other hand, novels depict other kinds of agancy as well. Some depict the transfer of "private" affect into "public" action via the "choices" of a fully rational, fully self-present consumer. How do these two models of agency coexist in various works? Are there other models as well, and how do they interact with the interiority model and the consumer model?
A course such as this is not designed to give students knowledge of what has been said about particular novels--you can search the MLA on-line catalogue using the novel's title as "subject" in order to find what you need to read about any given novel. Instead, we will develop ways of approaching any eighteenth-century novel that we might, in the future, read, teach, or write about. Developing modes of approaching novels requires, primarily, discovering and analyzing historical changes taking place during the eighteenth century. These changes--political, economic, social, sexual, and changes in ideas about gender--together worked toward bringing the new genre into existence; and the novels that are members of the new genre each contribute in various ways to promoting or undermining these historical changes. We will read primary and secondary (i.e., theoretical) materials in order to understand these changes and their relation to each of the novels listed below.
In addition to reading novels and understanding the historical milieu in which they are embedded, a novel course ought to present the central issues that have come up in literary historians' explorations of the novel. We will address directly in this course only two: the rise of the novel in relation to capitalism, and the novel's role in producing the bourgeois public sphere (or the split between the public and the private). For students who wish to know more about literary history of the novel, I will provide bibliographies of work done on other kinds of issues that have predominated scholarly discussions: two of these that I know of right now, and consequently which appear on the syllabus, are the question of class (the change, during the eighteenth century, from a society organized around status to one organized around socioeconomic class) and the literary movement known as sensibility; we may encounter other central issues of which I am not yet aware, and I will provide you with bibliographies on these issues as needed.
As to students' responsibilities, I have designed a course which is top-heavy with work during the semester but very light on work at the end when you will be most involved in grading your students' papers and writing other seminar papers. Your work is fourfold: 1) reading; 2) presentations; 3) journal; 4) Web Page.
1) Reading: You will be required to read one-half of long novels or one short novel plus one article per class.
2) Presentations: I will ask students to do 2 presentations each. Students will read an article or book, taking notes as they do so. They will then type up a summary or book review (1-2 pp.) which must be put in our boxes by the Monday morning preceding the class. The classroom presentation will ideally consist in leading class discussion about how this material is related to the novel or other text at hand.
3) Journal: Students will keep a journal of questions and thoughts they have about each class. What ideas did you get from the class? What didn't you understand at the beginning, but understand better now? What do you still not understand? What questions do you now have in mind as you do further reading? You might also add: questions, problems, etc. on the work you are doing to put together your presentations or your Web Page; evaluations of the conduct of the class (whether the texts went well together, what texts you wish had been included, etc.). Journal pages are due in my box by the Thursday morning following each class.
4) Web Page: Instead of writing a seminar paper, students will create their own web page providing scholarly information, an annotated bibliography including short essays, about a specific event, issue, or author either discussed in class or outside of it. Students will be shown how to construct a Web Page during one of our classes; we will meet at and will receive instruction on how to make these pages. In addition, I will meet with you once during the semester at a computer lab to help you put the research you have done so far onto the Web.
Rationale for creating a Web Page rather than writing a seminar paper: the research you do for your Web Page will be equivalent to the research you would need to do if writing a scholarly essay for publication; all that is missing is the argument and the writing of the essay. Because you will not have to do this writing, I would ask that you treat your journal essays seriously, that you try to write well when writing them (not for my benefit, but so that I can help you improve your writing during the course of the semester) and that you use them to think hard about the issues we are confronting in the class. In my response to your journal entries, I will note whether you have a potential argument, the kernel of an essay, in any of them. You may then wish to construct your web page on an issue relevant to this kernel so that, by the end of the class, you have all the materials ready to assemble a scholarly essay for publication.
In this class, students will perform all of the work necessary for writing a publishable seminar paper, and will thus have the opportunity to consciously figure out the stages and kinds of work necessary for writing them. In my view, this experience is more valuable than that of writing an essay too quickly, missing some of these stages. Should you need to produce from the coursework done here a writing sample for entry into a Ph.D. program or a publishable article, I would be glad to help you do so in the "Writing for Publication" seminar offered this summer (or on our own).
Furthermore, once your Web Page is created, I will be hooking it up to The Romantic Chronology Web Page at the University of California Santa Barbara: it will be, in effect, published! You can put your Web Page on your C.V. as one of your achievements when applying to Ph.D. programs and/or for jobs. You can also continue to add to it and update it as long as you are here at Miami, and if you wish can produce other Web pages on completely unrelated topics that will be made available through the Miami system.
Required Reading:
Recommended Reading:
Catherine Gallagher, Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820 (This book one the MLA prize for best book published in 1994.)
1/16 Introduction:
1) Theoretical Terms:
A) HO on the differences among: 1) sex, sexuality, gender; 2) person, individual,
subject.
B) Subjectivity: from Francis Barker, Beechey and Donald, Foucault's Discipline and Punish
C) Ideology: from Michael McKeon's
Origin of the English Novel
2) Historical overview: credit (Bank of England/South Sea Bubble) and kings (Glorious Revolution/Jacobite
Rebellions)
1/23 The Problem of Fiction
Defoe, Preface to Volume III of Robinson Crusoe
Samuel Johnson, Rambler 4
Lennox,
The Female Quixote (begin)
1/30 Fiction and Belief
Pres: Marc Shell, The Economy of Literature, Money, Language, Thought
Pres:
Mackay, "The South Sea Bubble," in Extraordinary and Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
Walter Benjamin, "Stamp Scams," London Review of Books, 8 September 1994
Lennox, The Female Quixote (finish)
2/6 The Advent of Capitalism: (HO on Class)
Pres: R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism
Pres: C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (HO: Excerpts from Locke's Two Treatises on Property
Pres: Nicholas Thomas, "Curiosity: Colonialism in its Infancy," in Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific
Max Weber, excerpt from The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: "The Spirit of Capitalism"
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (begin) (HO: Robinson Crusoe and Capital)
Recommended: Ann Louise Kibbie, "Monstrous Generation: The Birth of Capital in Defoe's Moll Flanders and Roxana," PMLA 110.5 (October 1995)
David Marshall, The Figure of Theater
2/13 The Rise of the Novel (HO):
Pres: Ian Watt, "Robinson Crusoe, Individualism, and the Novel," in The Rise of the Novel
Pres: David Saunders and Ian Hunter, "Lessons from the `Literatory': How to Historicise Authorship," Critical Inquiry 17.3 (Spring 1991): 479-509.
Michael McKeon, "Generic Transformation and Social Change: Rethinking the Rise of the Novel." Cultural Critique 1 (1985): 159-81
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (finish)
Recommended: Roxann Wheeler, "`My Savage,' `My Man': Racial Multiplicity in Robinson Crusoe," ELH 62.4 (Winter 1995): 821-862.
2/20 NO CLASS--Class Exchange Day
Fielding, Tom Jones (begin)
DUE: Submit your Web Page topic and schedule a meeting with me at the library so that we can look at sample Web Pages and discuss how to research your topic.
2/27 Pres: Ian Watt, "Fielding as Novelist: Tom Jones," in The Rise of the Novel
J. G. A. Pocock, "The Mobility of Property and the Rise of Eighteenth-Century Sociology," in Theories of Property: Aristotle to the Present, eds. Anthony Parel and Thomas Flanagan.
Fielding, Tom Jones (end)
3/5 Special Class on creating a Web Page
Samuel Richardson, Pamela (begin)
3/12 Public/Private (HO on Habermas)
Pres: Jürgen Habermas, excerpts from The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
Pres: Carole Pateman, "Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy," in The Disorder of Women
Nancy Armstrong, excerpts from Desire and Domestic Fiction: 3-27; 36-42; 59-69; 96-134.
Richardson, Pamela (finish)
Recommended: Lawrence E. Klein, "Gender and the Public/Private Distinction in the Eighteenth Century: Some Questions about Evidence and Analytic Procedure," in Eighteenth-Century Studies 29.1 (Fall 1995): 97-109.
Margaret C. Jacob, "The Mental Landscape of the Public Sphere: A European Perspective," Eighteenth-Century Studies 28.1 (Fall 1994): 95-114.
3/19 SPRING BREAK
3/26 Economy and Passion (HO on Consumerism))
Pres: Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph
Pres: Jean-Christophe Agnew, "The Spectacle of the Market," in Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750
Pres: Mary Poovey, "Aesthetics and Political Economy in the Eighteenth Century: The Place of Gender in the Social Constitution of Knowledge," in Aesthetics and Ideology, ed. George Levine
Adam Smith, excerpts from The Wealth of Nations, Theory of Moral Sentiments
Edgeworth, Belinda (begin)
DUE: Schedule meeting with me at computer lab.
4/2 (HO on the Consumption of Goods)
Pres: Neil McKendrick, "The Consumer Revolution of Eighteenth-Century England"; J. H. Plumb, "The Commercialization of Leisure" in Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commericalization of Eighteenth-Century England
Pres: Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction
Terry Lovell, "The Novel as Commodity," in Consuming Fiction
Edgeworth, Belinda (finish)
4/5 Extra Class: Guest Lecturer Jill Campbell, Yale Univ.
4/9 Pres: Erica Harth, "The Virtue of Love: Lord Hardwicke's Marriage Act," Cultural Critique 9 (1988): 123-154,"
Pres: R. B. Outhwaite, "Marriage as business: opinions on the rise in aristocratic bridal portions in early modern England," Business Life and Public Policy, eds. Neil McKendrick, R. B. Outhwaite.
Burney, Evelina (begin)
4/16 Sensibility (HO)
Pres: Henry Abelove, "Some Speculations on the History of Sexual Intercourse during the Long Eighteenth Century in England," Genders 6 (Fall 1989): 125-30.
Alan MacFarlane, "Love and Capitalism," The Culture of Capitalism
Burney, Evelina (finish)
4/23 Pres: Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (HO)
Fenwick, Secresy
4/30 Class Canceled to Make Up for Extra Class