ENGL3751: Embodied Victorians

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• To explore a range of Victorian literary representations of the body, the senses and sensation, through a variety of genres including fiction, poetry and life writing.
• To examine how literary culture in the nineteenth century responded to and influenced debates in medicine and science about the significance of embodied experience.
• To expose students to key methods and concepts for theorising literary representations of embodied experience, drawing from work on phenomenology, affect studies and new materialism.
• To develop sensitivity to appropriate historical contexts for understanding the literature under discussion, such as theories of evolution and degeneration, the history of sexuality, and sciences of mind.
• To introduce students to a range debates in the emergent field of medical humanities, including about the nature of pain, the relationship between body and environment, and the significance of the clinical encounter.

• Focuses on literature of the second half of the nineteenth century, examining the significance of embodied experience. Thematic concerns will address of range of topics relating to the body, such as the relationship between body and mind, representations of the body in pain, the significance of shame, and the materiality of the voice.
• Combines major writers of the period, such as George Eliot, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Thomas Hardy, with less well-known figures such as Vernon Lee and Richard Jefferies.
• Considers Victorian literature in its global contexts by examining texts by cosmopolitan writers, such as Lafcadio Hearn, and significant writers of colour, such as Mary Seacole and Frederick Douglass.
• Examines a range of literary genres (novels, short fiction, poetry, autobiography) and encourages close attention to the distinct representational strategies of each.
• Allows students to draw productive comparison between texts in response to a wide range of broader thematic issues (e.g. aestheticism and the body, the body and race, sexuality and the body, ecology and the body).
• Incorporates a variety of theoretical approaches and methodologies, drawing on phenomenology, affect theory, queer theory, psychoanalysis, and techniques of close reading.

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• Students will gain a wide-ranging understanding of the variety of literary representations of the body in this literary-historical period, and will be introduced to appropriate historical contexts in nineteenth-century medicine, science and intellectual history.
• Students will develop a grasp of appropriate critical and theoretical methodologies for understanding ways in which literary texts represent bodies and embodied experience.

Subject-specific Skills:

• critical skills in the close reading and analysis of texts
• an ability to demonstrate knowledge of a range of texts and critical approaches
• informed awareness of formal and aesthetic dimensions of literature and ability to offer cogent analysis of their workings in specific texts
• sensitivity to generic conventions and to the shaping effects on communication of historical circumstances, and to the affective power of language
• an ability to articulate and substantiate an imaginative response to literature
• an ability to articulate knowledge and understanding of concepts and theories relating to literary studies
• command of a broad range of vocabulary and an appropriate critical terminology
• awareness of literature as a medium through which values are affirmed and debated

Key Skills:

• a capacity to analyse complex texts critically
• an ability to acquire complex information of diverse kinds in a structured and systematic way involving the use of distinctive interpretative skills derived from the subject
• skills of effective communication and argument
• competence in the planning and execution of essays
• awareness of conventions of scholarly presentation, and bibliographic skills including accurate citation of sources and consistent use of scholarly conventions of presentation
• a capacity for independent thought and judgement, and ability to assess the critical ideas of others
• skills in critical reasoning
• an ability to handle information and argument in a critical manner
• information-technology skills such as word-processing and electronic data access information
• organisation and time-management skills

• Seminars: encourage peer-group discussion, enable students to develop critical skills in the close reading and analysis of texts, and skills of effective communication and presentation; promote awareness of diversity of interpretation and methodology.
• Consultation session: encourages students to reflect critically and independently on their work.
• Independent but directed reading in preparation for seminars provides opportunity for students to enrich subject-specific knowledge and enhances their ability to develop appropriate subject-specific skills.
• Typically, directed learning may include assigning student(s) an issue, theme or topic that can be independently or collectively explored within a framework and/or with additional materials provided by the tutor. This may function as preparatory work for presenting their ideas or findings (sometimes electronically) to their peers and tutor in the context of a seminar; informal position papers encourage students to advance claims and refine them in the light of seminar discussion
• Coursework: tests the student's ability to argue, respond and interpret, and to demonstrate subject-specific knowledge and skills such as appreciation of the role played by the imagination in literary production and the close reading and analysis of texts; they also test the ability to present word-processed work, observing scholarly conventions.
• Feedback: The written feedback that is provided after the first assessed essay allows students to reflect on examiners' comments, giving students the opportunity to improve their work for the second essay.

Before the first essay, students will have an individual consultation session in which they are entitled to show their seminar leader a list of points relevant to the essay and receive oral comment on these points. Students may also, if they wish, discuss their ideas for the second essay at this meeting.

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