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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Beginning with The Symposium and ending with selected modernist writings, how Eros has appeared and been expressed in the West.
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3.00 Credits
Until visitation was restricted in 1770, London's Bethlem Hospital (popularly known as "Bedlam") attracted as many as 96,000 spectators per year who paid for the privilege of watching mental patients. Like the tigers in The Tower, these patients were not simply chained, but shown, put on exhibition. The cruelty of this practice and the fact that it was stopped both point to the eighteenth-century fascination with madness, with the irrational, with what Freud would call the "unheimlich," the "uncanny." Samuel Johnson's astronomer who comes to believe that he personally controls the weather, Laurence Sterne's mad Maria, piping for her lost lover, John Locke's man who believes himself made out of glass and who acts "reasonably" to avoid hard objects, or Jonathan Swift's modest proposer who concocts a cookbook to save the Irish nation all bear witness to this other side of the eighteenth century, the subject of this course. We will begin with selections from Cervantes' Don Quixote and some short readings in Locke and others who attempted to analyze madness. We will then move on to explorations of Samuel Johnson, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, and Jonathan Swift. Our major focus will be on Swift, with special attention to his poetry, Gulliver's Travels, and A Tale of A Tub. Swift, who was a Governor of Bethlem Hospital, left most of his money to fund the first mental hospital in Ireland, St. Patrick's, which is still there. As he later said, "He gave what little wealth he had, To build a house for fools and mad: And showed by one satiric touch, No nation wanted it so much." For the sake of comparison, we will conclude with several nineteenth century selections.
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3.00 Credits
Novels by Braddon, Eliot, and James in the context of art, science, and their place in a changing social structure.
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3.00 Credits
This course is an examination of major Victorian novels.
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3.00 Credits
How the topics of religion and religous satre were explored by 18th-century British writers.
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3.00 Credits
An examination of neglected 19th-century British novels and novelists, including gothic novels, sensation novels, and science fiction.
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3.00 Credits
An exploration of the treatment of gender in the nineteenth-century British novel.
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3.00 Credits
By examining texts from the different nations within the British Isles--Scotland, Ireland, and England--we will explore the complex question of how national boundaries are drawn, how a sense of membership in a nation is created, and what that might have to do with falling in love, getting married, and staying married.
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3.00 Credits
A close examination of the religious origins and underpinnings in, and of, the poetry of Herbert and Hopkins.
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3.00 Credits
How should I behave? Do I make my own decisions, or rely on the advice of others? Am I defined by my birth and family, or do I make myself. What exactly is "virtue?" Which matters more, the individual or the community? Can I be virtuous if I'm poor - or rich ? Is it not virtuous to be rich in an expanding economy? Is Virtue possible in a mobile society which values flexibility above stability? Questions such as these are taken up by 18th-century writers of fiction and by philosophers like Shaftesbury and Rousseau. Female virtue supposedly consisted mainly or only in a demonstrable chastity. Women writers of the 18th century demonstrate the degree of artifice in which even "good" women must engage. In Daniel Defoe's Roxana, a wife abandoned by her husband with five children and no income finds that she can market herself, even acquiring great wealth. Should she have starved instead? Roxana plays with various selves on a road to what looks like success. In contrast. Pamela, the beautiful maidservant in the first novel about sexual harassment, tries to resist the advances of her young master. Is she just being conceited, or trying to raise her value? Can "Virtue" ever exist without conceit and self-consciousness? Henry Fielding in Tom Jones, the History of a Foundling, follows the fortunes of a male bastard who both is and is not accepted by his adoptive world. What does Virtue mean to the male life? How many affairs can he have - and with whom? Is prostitution an option for him? What does virtue mean in relation to the male life? Gothic novels and courtship novels, including Austen's Pride and Prejudice, question our desires for both autonomy and social success, for spiritual identity and economic security. Novels and plays repeatedly question how a moral center may be found at a time when social and familial boundaries, sexual manners and permitted behaviors are all changing. Throughout he period, a variety of narrative modes and the development of new styles alert readers to the range of possibilities and varieties of moral reasoning.
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