ENGL 6480

Forms of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2015-2016.

What kinds of knowledge does Victorian literature make? Attending to representations of small scales of interiority as well as vast living systems, we will consider when and how novels and poems enfold the knowledge practices of ethics, biology, sociology, psychology, and philosophy. Raymond Williams writes of a naive nineteenth-century realism, "We thought we had only to open our eyes to see a common world," but we will examine how Victorian literature creates as well as distorts images of a common reality as it reimagines practices of knowing. We will also evaluate the consequences of recent accounts of the novel as information, and of critical efforts to forge methods for interdisciplinary scholarship. Likely authors include Austen, Gaskell, Tennyson, Dickens, Eliot, Carroll, Hardy, and Stoker; theorists include Moretti, Gallagher, ​Poovey, Jameson, Foucault, Daston, Deleuze, and Thacker.

When Offered Spring.

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