SEMESTER 2, 2017
Course Information

• Course Coordinator
• Joanne Wilkes  j.wilkes@auckland.ac.nz
• Teachers

Alex Calder  a.calder@auckland.ac.nz

Claudia Marquis  c.marquis@auckland.ac.nz

• Tutor

Joanne Wilkes  j.wilkes@auckland.ac.nz

• Course delivery format

2 hours of lectures and 1 hour of tutorial

(Timetable and room details can be viewed on Student Services Online)

Summary of Course Description   

In the fifth chapter of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865), the Caterpillar asks Alice, "Who are you?" Alice is perplexed, and ends up saying, ‘'I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, sir … because I'm not myself, you see."

Much nineteenth-century literature was centrally concerned with the capacities and potentialities of the human mind, including questions of identity. This course aims to trace these concerns through a variety of texts from the 1790s through to the 1880s. Because the inner life was especially a focus of poetry, most of the texts on the course are in this form, but some prose is featured too – including Alice in Wonderland.

The course is divided into two sections, although the interests of the two sections are not mutually exclusive. It begins with the Romantic concept of the imagination, studied through ST Coleridge’s poetry from the 1790s, and his famous definition of the imagination in Biographia Literaria (1817). It then considers notable explorations of psychological states, including unusual and aberrant psychological states: in James Hogg’s novel, Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), and in the dramatic monologues of this genre’s most prominent Victorian practitioners, Robert Browning and Augusta Webster, from the 1830s through the 1880s. This section ends with Carroll’s "Alice" books and their more light-hearted but still probing exploration of questions of identity.

The second half of the course concentrates on interactions between the self and other, primarily through love, broadly conceived. It starts with the poetry of Keats from the second decade of the century, and continues with Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850). As with Augusta Webster’s poetry in the first section, Victorian constructions of gender are significant to Barrett Browning’s work. And as with Hogg’s novel, nineteenth-century religious beliefs are central to Alfred Lord Tennyson’s extended elegy, In Memoriam (1850), which is famous for (among other things) raising questions about human and social development later canvassed in Darwin’s works. Both social contexts and constructions of gender are relevant to the last text covered in this section, Elizabeth Gaskell’s novella Cousin Phillis (1864), which sets the female world of domesticity against the increasingly industrialised male domain of paid work and mobility.

Weekly Topics

Week 1 (24 and 26 July):  Introduction x 2 (Joanne Wilkes)

Week 2 (31 July and 2 August): S. T. Coleridge: the Imagination, poetry; P. B. Shelley, poetry (Alex Calder)

Week 3 (7 and 9 August): S. T. Coleridge (poetry, concl.)  (Alex Calder)

 James Hogg, Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (Joanne Wilkes)

Week 4 (14 and 16 August): Hogg, Private Memoirs... (Joanne Wilkes)

Robert Browning, Dramatic Monologues (Joanne Wilkes)

Week 5 (21 and 23 August): Robert Browning, Dramatic Monologues (Joanne Wilkes) x 2

Week 6 (28 and 30 August): Augusta Webster, Dramatic Monologues (Joanne Wilkes) x 2  First essay due, Wed 30 August, 4pm

Mid-Semester Break

Week 7 (18 and 20 September): Lewis Carroll, The Annotated Alice (Joanne Wilkes) x 2

Week 8 (25 and 27 September): John Keats's poetry (Joanne Wilkes) x 2

Week 9 (2 and 4 October ) John Keats's poetry (Joanne Wilkes)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese  (Joanne Wilkes)

Week 10 (9 and 11 October) Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese  (Joanne Wilkes)

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam (Claudia Marquis) Second essay due, Wed 11 October, 4pm

Week 11 (16 and 18 October) Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam (Claudia Marquis)

Elizabeth Gaskell, Cousin Phillis (Joanne Wilkes)

Week 12 (25 October)  Elizabeth Gaskell, Cousin Phillis  (Joanne Wilkes) 

Prescribed Texts:

James Hogg, Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, ed. Ian Duncan. Oxford World's Classics, 2010.  ISBN 9780 199217953

Workload:

The University of Auckland's expectation on 15-point courses, is that students spend 10 hours per week on the course. Students manage their academic workload and other commitments accordingly. Students attend two hours of lectures each week and participate in a one-hour tutorial from week 2 of semester. This leaves seven hours per week outside the classroom to prepare for tutorials, assignments and the exam.