ENGL 673 B1: Studies in Victorian Literature: Victorian Projects of the Self

P. Sinnema

This course takes up a few central prose “statements” about the individual as a construct—of narrative fiction (i.e. the first-person voice/perspective typical of the bildungsroman), of scientific debate (evolutionary, legal, and psychological investigation), of the emergent self-help industry, of “modern” poetry—in order to investigate how the self was conceptualized (written, positioned, dissected) and subjected (to juridical, state, satirical, etc. apparatuses and practices, but also made into a semi-autonomous being, an agential subject) in Victorian Britain. The idea of the self serves as one potential touchstone for our approach to these disparate texts; students are encouraged to develop and refine their own interpretive interests, and to have the selections from Source of the Self and Villette read for the start of class.

TEXTS: 
Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853)—Broadview
Samuel Smiles, Self-Help (1859)—Oxford World’s Classics
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)—Broadview
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861)—Broadview
Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius (1869)—Cosimo Classics
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871)—Prometheus
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (1989) [selections—provided]—Harvard