Linda Shires' Recent Courses

ETS 192/WSP 192 Gender and Literary Texts: 19th Century Novels to Film
This course examines 5 "classic" British novels of the 19th century as literary texts and as 20th century film adaptations. In nineteenth-century England, the novel was in its heyday, a popular culture form, reaching an increasingly literate, mass audience, who were often educated into social issues through the fiction they read. The novel took up centrally the vexed issues of love, relationship, sexuality, and gender, often linking these issues with those of class, race, and nation --and not just with domesticity. We will move historically through the century, from 1813 to 1897, reading Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice , Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre , Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights , Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles , and Bram Stoker's Dracula . The course will pay special attention to narrators and to fictional structures, as well as to the ways these novels trouble, critique, and support the gender divisions that dominated the nineteenth century imagination. We will read each novel through the filter of basic gender theory, and then, as we are finishing the novel, we will watch a film adaptation to see how the 20th century "read" and "pictured" these texts and why it did so, before we move on to the next novel. Thus we will establish a dialogue between centuries and between two popular forms: novel and film. Note: Sections meet together.

ETS 310 Literature, Culture, and Social Change: The British Empire

The Nineteenth Century is known as Britain's imperial century, a period when "the sun never set on the British empire." It was a period of immense social change, pockmocked by wars, increasing industrialization, and changes in the status of slaves, of women, and of the lower classes. Historians, theorists, and literary critics all debate how ‘present' imperialism might be in the literature of the period. We will examine the motives for continued British colonial rule and the ways in which Victorian Britons viewed colonial peoples, in which colonialism abroad determined British society at home, and in which British attitudes changed as the century progressed. Colonialism shaped and reflected many British assumptions on race, gender, and class. I will be arguing, following Gayatri Spivack, that one can not read the literature of nineteenth century Britain without seeing the presence of colonialism and imperialism. It is in the texture, the rhetoric, and the absences of the literature.

We start much earlier than Victoria's reign with the 1719 shipwreck novel Robinson Crusoe , a foundational text both for the novel genre and for the literature of colonialism. But the bulk of the course will concern texts from the mid-Victorian period into the 1880's and beyond. The course examines English myths of power and national identity, race and ethnicity classifications, economics, sexuality and gender, and how nationalism and empire were served by explorers, adventurers, missionaries, and soldiers. We will consider not only fiction, but also essays, photography and museum displays to test the “reach” of empire in British literature.

ETS 340 Discourse Analysis: Representations of the Holocaust (cross-listed with JSP) formerly ETS443/JSP400

The Holocaust has gone mainstream—from historical fact to world view. By this I mean that in the last quarter century the increased prominence of the Holocaust in our cultural memory has has affected film, art, literature, scholarship, and the creation of memorials and museums. But what is being remembered and how, and why? In what ways is the Holocaust being represented?This course concerns the twentieth and twenty-first century accounts of the meanings of the Holocaust through discourses and institutions—how it has been remembered, processed, witnessed, spoken, packaged, silenced. Texts include memoir, film, testimony, architecture, icons, literature, and installation art.

ETS 340 Theoretical Modes of Inquiry: Reading Pictures/Reading Texts

How do we read books that contain pictures, illustrations, photographs, charts, and other visuals. This course is an inquiry into the numerous relationships between verbal and visual arts. The course is interdisciplinary and innovative, drawing on visual studies theory and literary theory.

Sample BOOKS : Picturing Texts , eds. Lester Faigley et al., N.Y.: WW. Norton and Company, 2004; Vanity Fair by William Thackaray, Austerlitz by WG Sebald; Maus by Art Spiegelman, Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling, Winsor McCay The Best of Little Nemo in Slumber Land ; Maurice Sendak In the Night Kitchen ; Where the Wild Things Are, Charles Dickens Sketches by Boz; David Rees Get Another War On II. http://www.blakearchive.org , www.picturingtexts.com and numerous online resources.

English 700 Intro to Imperialism and Nationalism: Victorian Lit and Culture

This is a research course, exploring a wealth of nineteenth-century British non-fiction prose published in various forms including journals, magazines, newspaper articles, and cartoons. Much of the material has not been reprinted. We will start well before the Victorian era though with the foundational novel Robinson Crusoe , which will introduce us to central issues of isolation, religion, colonialism, economics, race, and nation. Afterwards, we will read other texts in common, but you will also do a large amount of independent research leading to a series of class presentations, each designed to teach you particular research skills and writing formats. You will learn bibliographical and research techniques to discover primary source material in Bird Library and other libraries towards a final, original research paper. You will also be given a tutorial by our research librarian and a visit to Rare Books and Manuscripts and you will be provided with lists of primary research sources and extensive bibiography in key background studies of this period. In courses like this that I have given in the past, the primary research will be useful for a conference paper, dossier paper, dissertation focus, or publishable essay.

Sample Required Texts : Available at Follet's Orange bookstore. Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe (Penguin); Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (Broadview—get this edition); The White Man's Burdens poetry anthology; Rudyard Kipling from The Man Who Would Be King and other stories (OUP); Wilkie Collins The Moonstone (OUP); Mary Kingsley Travels in West Africa (Natl Geographic)

English 700 Grad Reading: Victorian Poetry: Gender, Poetics, Politics

This course will be devoted to Victorian Poetry, a poetry of the post-Romantic subject and post-Cartesian perspectival vision. It will investigate gender relations in particular and will necessarily take up the visual arts of painting and photography with which Victorian poetry was in constant dialogue in order to explore the co-ordinates of

1) VISION 2) SEX/GENDER 3) SOCIAL POLITICS . When I say “gender relations,” I mean not only relationships between the sexes within poems, but the spectrum of masculinities and femininities represented and why, the relationship of representation to a spectrum of masculinities and femininities lived in the period; the critique of separate spheres ideology, the special place and use found for the feminine within the poetry of sensation, the feminization of poetry itself in the marketplace during the period, the rise of the woman poet and artist and their re-visioning of specific texts and genres of male predecessors and contemporaries, the erotics and politics of queer poetry and art, and the relationship of gender to issues of class and nation. When I say “vision” I am concerned with how the Cartesian theory of vision is called into question during this period—one of a rise in the technologies of viewing and one that makes the lyric speaker become subject and object for the reader in a way very different from Romanticism. Finally Victorian poetry is a poetry of the “social.” It is highly self-conscious about issues of representation and, in both its new conservative and dissident strains, it is concerned not only to enact consciousness but it also is committed to renovate society. Of course, there are different projects of renovation, different definitions of what counts as society, and different justifications for change.

English 747 Studies in Literature 1832-1914: Photography, Mimesis, the Novel

This course studies the nineteenth-century novel in relation to photography, concentrating on the separate developments and interactions of these media. Between 1805 and 1905 a style founded on the relationship between narrative and picture both flourished and decayed. Yet in the mid-nineteenth century, due to advances in optics and science but before the advent of photography, a transformation of seeing (and consuming) occurred with a new valuing of visual experience. Jonathan Crary thus articulates a difference between “visibility” (a theory and practice of representation based on the natural process of seeing) and “visuality” (a theory and practice of imaging the visualized that could not have occurred without technological advances). The course will examine relationships between picture and narrative and will go on to investigate in what ways photography altered vision, narrative, and the notion of an observer. Nancy Armstrong asserts that, after the advent of photography, fiction took a stronger pictorial turn during a period when its audience became increasingly hungry for certain kinds of visual information. This is a notion worth testing. Novels chosen for the class may be said to be realistic and unrealistic but not fundamentally anti-realistic.

The course inquires into definitions, histories, and techniques of realism, the relationship of verifiable to unverifiable sights in visual experience and in literary representation, concepts of subjective and objective vision, the development of machines (camera obscura, phenakistiscope, stereoscope, diorama, kaleidoscope, magic lantern, camera) and how they alter possibilities of seeing, the relationship of image to theories of the body, identity, and character, the relationship of seeing to telling, passivity vs. productivity of the observer, the politics of focus, epistemological and institutional conditions of the observer, surveillance and spaces of contestation, pre-history of Debordian spectacle, charade, tableaux vivants. The concerns of the class can't be divorced from issues of class, gender, ethnicity and nationality. The course should appeal to students interested in Victorian literature, regimes of seeing, the novel, and the relationship of the “literary” to other media.

Possible texts: Thackeray's Vanity Fair (Oxford ed. with T's drawings); Dickens' Bleak House (Penguin ed. with illustrations by Phiz—i.e. Browne); Carroll's Alice's Adventures Underground (facs ms) and Alice in Wonderland (Bantam ed. with C's drawings); Hardy's Jude the Obscure (serial illustrations by Hatherell). Photographers to be studied include: Cameron, Carroll, Hawarden, Fox Talbot, Robinson, Rejlander. Drawings in texts to be studied include those by Thackeray and Carroll. Critics represented in readings include: Crary, Armstrong, Meisel, Gersheim, Mitchell, Silverman, Barthes, Berger, Benjamin, Foucault and others.