Welcome to English 208

 

What does it mean to read? And, over the past few centuries, during which the ability to read passed from a small elite of priests and clerics to the professional classes generally, and finally became nearly universal, how has the meaning of the act of reading changed? In this section of British Literature, we’ll survey a variety of texts from 1722 to the present, looking both at the stories and characters they contain, but also at their changing relationship to society in a time of steadily increasing literacy. In the end, we’ll look back to see how, and why, some of these texts emerged as part of an evolving literary “canon,” while others came and went, or never reached that space at all. Our path must needs be a crooked one, and the scope of three centuries allows little time for gawking – but we’ll certainly give it a try.

Along the way, we’ll visit London during the pandemic – the one of 1665 -- ponder the pages of Dr. Johnson’s famous Dictionary, and curse the bloodless schoolmaster with Blake. Next we’ll visit the humble cottager with Wordsworth, and sail into silent seas with Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner.  Once back in port it will be time to put away such fancies, and enjoy the furtive fruits of widespread social repression; it will be time for the tightening of corsets as we wander the fountains and crystal palaces (built just on top of open sewers) known as the Victorian Age.  We will explore both the surface world of pre-Raphaelite pleasantries and patent processes, as well as the underworld of cheap lodging-houses, twelve-hour workdays for children, and a London in which more than 250 people a month died of typhus and water-borne diseases  (including Prince Albert!).  Among our guides here will be Charles Dickens, Henry Mayhew, and George Eliot.  

Having indulged, by then, in one too many rich pastries (or perhaps expired from drinking a glass of Thames water), we’ll toss all we’ve studied once more into the rubbish bin of history, and try to shore a new modernism against these ruins. Lastly, having ridden the roller-coaster of modernism, we’ll watch it all crack up again, with the exploded generations of two world wars, the bitter reaction against Britain’s colonial exploitation, the emergence of postcolonial poetry and art as empire’s evening returns into sand, amidst which two vast and trunkless legs . . . and so it goes.