TTh 11:30-12:45 in 1021 CASL Building
Instructor: Jonathan Smith
Office: 3084 CASL Building
Office Phone: 436-9187
Office Hours: TTh 1:15-2:45 and by appointment
E-mail: jonsmith@umich.edu
Class E-mail Address: umd.eng434@umich.edu
English 434 studies the 19th-Century English Novel. Our focus this semester will be three Victorian novels of development--Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss--but we will also read Charles Dickens’s Hard Times in weekly installments, duplicating the experience of the novel’s original readers. During the first part of the term, we will use the material in “Charlotte’s Web,” a hypertext on Charlotte Bronte’s novel developed by students in prior versions of this course, to discuss Jane Eyre in its literary, cultural, and biographical contexts, and we will examine examples of major modern critical approaches to the novel (psychoanalytic, deconstructive, post-colonial, Marxist, feminist, and gender criticism). In the second part of the term, we will use these various approaches to facilitate our discussions of the other three works, and each student will conduct a research project that will be incorporated into either “Charlotte’s Web” or “Pip’s World,” the hypertext developed on Great Expectations by students in prior versions of this course.
Texts
Course
Requirements and Grades
Syllabus
How
To Read a Victorian Novel
Homework
Assignments
Research
Project
Charlotte's
Web: A Hypertext on Jane Eyre
Pip's
World: A Hypertext on Great Expectations
Writing
a Literature Paper
Victorian
Sites on the Web