Mini-Presentations
Distributed
throughout the term
Time
length: 5 minutes
Assignment
#1 (Mary Barton)
Due
Wednesday, Sept. 5
Format:
1-2 pages in length.
Your
comments may be fairly informal. Numbered responses are fine.
Compare and contrast Gaskell’s ‘project statement’ in her "Preface" (pp. 29-31) to Engels’ approach in The Condition of the Working Class in England.1. How do you respond to the tone of Gaskell’s "Preface"?
2. Why is Gaskell writing? How would you describe her attitude towards her subject matter ("the poor uneducated factory-workers of Manchester")?
3. How does Gaskell imagine the figure of the crowd? How is her portrait similar to or different from that of Engels?
Paper
#1
Due
Friday, September 21
Page
length: 3-5 pages
You are welcome to pursue a topic of your own or to choose one of the topics listed below. I merely ask that you clear your special topic with me ahead of time.
1.) Readers of Engels cannot help but note his unflinching emphasis on human waste in The Condition of the Working Class in England. Why do you think he portrays this unpleasant subject so insistently? What is it about waste that makes it such an evocative subject for Engels?
2.) Discuss techniques
of representation in Mary Barton and/or The Condition of the
Working Class. Consider one of the following subjects:
- Human - or inhuman
- feeling (rage, sympathy, calculation)
- The metaphorics of
the city, the country, or the environment at large
- Individualism
- Class relations (‘contrasts’)
- The new and the old,
progress and regression
- Economic logic ("improvidence"
and political economy)
- Character formation
- Animality, brutality,
"sensuality"
3.) What is the relation between the personal and the political in Mary Barton?
4.) How do you read the ending of Mary Barton? What kind of commentary does it offer on the future of the community? Do you read it as a hopeful ending? A mythic ending? A disappointing ending? Why?
5.) Explore the politics of visibility and invisibility in works by Engels, Ure, Foucault, or Gaskell. How (and why) do these texts use techniques of concealment and exposure?
6.) Compare the role
of the individual in sketches of the factory (or factory town) by Ure,
Foucault, and/or Engels. Make sure to think about how these works
represent the play of power, discipline, and intelligence (what Foucault
describes as a ‘new microphysics of power’).
Assignment
#2
Due
Friday, October 12
Page
length: 1-2 pages
Write an INFORMAL RESPONSE to Dickens’s story "The Signalman" (in Selected Short Fiction, pp. 78-89). Your response should be typed and double-spaced.
Consider the following
questions:
1.) What would you describe
as the central concern of this story? Why?
2.) How would you describe
this story’s narrator? By the story’s last paragraph, what is your assessment
of his psychological condition?
3.) In your view, what
sort of portrait does "The Signalman" offer us of modern technology?
4.) Could we read this
story as a ghost story? A moral tale? An allegory? As something else?
Paper
#2
Due
Friday, October 26
Page
length: 3-5 pages
You are welcome to pursue a topic of your own OF to choose one of the topics listed below. I merely ask that you clear your special topic with me ahead of time.
TOPICS:
1.)
Consider the role of fantasy, myth, or the supernatural in a sketch of
technology that we have read recently ? whether from Dickens’s short fiction,
Hard Times, or a passage from Dombey and Son (you need not have finished
Dombey). What sorts of values are upheld in your chosen sketch? Why
do you think Dickens treats technology in the way that he does?
2.) Basing your conclusions on one or two works, how would you define the Victorian industrial subject? How is industrial consciousness represented in your text(s)? Why? In your paper you are also welcome to consider works of visual art (such as those listed as presentation topics) and criticism (Schivelbusch, Sternberger, and Foucault).
3.) In a text of your choice, explore the metaphorics of the city, the country, or the environment at large. What do you find particularly striking about the sense of place conveyed in this work? Why is it represented as it is? Some particularly rich works to choose from are Dickens’s Uncommercial Traveller (in Short Fiction), Hard Times, and the disappearance of Stagg’s Garden in Dombey and Son (pp.289-92).
4.)
Write a paper that more closely develops one of your arguments for assignment
#2 on "The Signalman" (especially to sub-questions #3 and 4).
Abstract
of final paper:
Due
by 5 PM on Firday, November 16.
Abstracts
should be one paragraph long. They should include the texts and/or
evidence you will be using in your paper, tentative arguments you will
be making, questions that you will be asking, and approaches that you will
be taking.
Final
Paper
Due
Thursday, December 13 by 5 PM in the English Department
Page
length: 8 pages