ENGL 355-01, Patterns of Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, Fall 2011

Abstract

This course will explore major works of nineteenth-century fiction by focusing on how different authors read and write about the human body. Can we “read” facial expressions and telling gestures? What do we know about a character from their posture? We often make strong, indelible judgments about people from such small movements, but are these things that can be captured in words? This course will consider the ways in which these descriptions fit into or disrupt broader cultural and ideological frameworks of race, class, and gender, but also how they complicate our contemporary images of Romantic and Victorian living. Along the way, we will also ask what reading does to us while we turn page after page, alternately sympathizing with characters and recoiling from scenes, getting bored, or inventing new variations as we read.