This course will seek to help students develop a critical approach to fiction. Students will learn to place literary texts within a certain line of inquiry, and articulate their contribution through close reading and analysis. Towards this end, the course will focus on a specific set of texts produced during a certain historical moment: the long 19th century. We will be particularly concerned with those texts that make moral and social arguments. From tyrannical abuses of power to anti-Semitism, literature produced over the 19th century in Britain targeted a range of social and political ills, and writers often sought to produce in their readers some sort of moral change through an affective representation of these wrongs. A specific point of departure within the broad theme of social critique will therefore be the role emotions play in this regard. We’ll be looking not only at how these problems were represented in literature, but at the way such emotions as anger, fear, shame and sympathy were deployed in these texts’ arguments. This course proposes to examine the way a variety of texts – poetry, fiction, essays and philosophical treatises – engaged in this discourse. Students will also learn to work with secondary criticism and current critical theory in order to place their ideas within a larger scholarly framework

Texts:

• William Godwin. Caleb Williams.
• Elizabeth Gaskell. Ruth.
• Charles Dickens. Hard Times.
• George Eliot. Daniel Deronda.

Course Pack