COURSE DESCRIPTION

Program Status:  This course can be applied toward fulfilling part of the requirements for several possible program “tracks,” including but not limited to the Victorian Studies and Cultural Studies program tracks.

This course will study later Victorian poetry, drama, painting, graphic arts, short fiction, contemporary (Victorian) works of criticism and critical theory (and will provide an opportunity to study Victorian music, architecture, and historiography), as a means of examining the period's varying views of art and aesthetics, especially as they evolved into fin-de-siècle and early modernist theories of—and the quasi-"interventionist" movements that were variously called—aestheticism, decadence, and Art Nouveau.

The course will treat particularly the works of prominent and influential late Victorian Aesthetes and Decadents (influential to Victorians as well as to Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Yeats, Woolf, Faulkner, and others)—the Pre-Raphaelites, Ruskin, Pater, Dowson, Symons, Wilde, Beardsley, and some of the more prominent women “Decadents.”

Many writers, artists, and dandies in the late nineteenth century felt themselves caught between a High Victorian poetics they found no longer efficacious and their prescient anxiety over the prospects of a wholly “decentered,” relativistic, and “undecidable” metaphysics.  In response, these intellectuals sought, though through different means, to embrace a “Religion of Art.”  They embodied (with varying degrees of self-consciousness) the irony of an iconoclastic status quo, a conservational avant-garde, a salvational decadence—whether their efforts resembled Ruskin's apocalyptic dread or the sort of “camp” sensibility described by Susan Sontag.  How they did it, where their efforts led, and even what their solutions implied are all questions the course hopes to address.

The course will try specifically to organize the student's efforts toward producing a publishable professional article.
 

SCHEDULE (subject to modest negotiation)

Week  1
Introduction to the course
Introduction—background
Slides of High Victorian & Pre-Raphaelite paintings
[0 pages]

Week 2
Alfred Lord Tennyson—“The Poet,” “The Lady of Shalott”
William Michael Rossetti—“The Brotherhood in a Nutshell,” “Notes on Paintings”
Holman Hunt—“The Impact of Ruskin”
Misc. critical reactions: “Controversy and Ideology”
John Ruskin—“Letters to the Times,” “Notes on some Paintings,” “Pre-Raphaelitism,” from “Of Truth of Space,” from “The Naturalist Ideal,” from “The Grotesque Ideal,” from “Of the Pathetic Fallacy,” from “The Nature of Gothic,” from “Roman Renaissance,” “Grotesque Renaissance”
[230 pages]

Week 3
Walter Pater—The Renaissance; Greek Studies 250-55, Plato & Platonism 103-108, "Style,” “Child in the House,” “Emerald Uthwart,” “Prince of Court Painters,” “Sebastian von Storck,” “Apollo in Picardy”
[ca. 400 pages, plus notes]

Week 4
Arthur Symons, “Ernest Dowson”
Ernest Dowson—Poetry: “In Preface: For Adelaide,” “Vita summa brevis,” “A Coronal,” “Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration,” “Villanelle of Sunset,” “My Lady April,” “To One in Bedlam,” “Ad Domnulam Suam,” “Amor Umbratilis,” “Yvonne of Brittany,” “Benedictio Domini,” “Growth,” “Ad Manus Puellae,” “Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae,” “Vanitas,” “Exile,” “Spleen,” “O Mors! Quam Amara Est Memoria,” “You would have understood me had you waited,” “April Love,” “Vain Hope,” “Vain Resolves,” “A Requiem,” “Beata Solitudo,” “Terre Promise,” “Villanelle of His Lady’s Treasures,” “Gray Nights,” “The Garden of Shadow,” “Vesperal,” “Extreme Unction,” “Amantium Irae,” “Impenetentia Ultima,” “A Valediction,” “Cease smiling, Dear! a little while be sad,” “Seraphita,” “Epigram,” “Beyond,” “Carthusians,” “Three Witches,” “Saint Germaine-en-Laye,” “To His Mistress,” “Jadis,” “In a Breton Cemetery,” “The Sea-Change,” “Dregs,” “Venite Descendamus,” “Transition,” “Exchanges,” “A Last Word”
Dowson—Fiction: Introduction, “Souvenirs of an Egoist,” “The Diary of a Successful Man,” “A Case of Conscience,” “The Fortunate Islands,” “Absinthia Taetra,” “The Visit,” “The Princess of Dreams”
[163 pages]
——BIBLIOGRAPHY DUE——

Week 5
Arthur Symons—Criticism: “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” “The World as Ballet”
Symons—Poetry:  “Preface to the Second Edition of Silhouettes: Being a Word on Behalf of Patchouli,” “Eyes,” “Morbidezza,” “Maquillage,” “Impression,” “On Meeting After,” “Emmy,” “The Absinthe-Drinker,” “Javanese Dancers,” “Preface to 2nd Edition of London Nights,” “Prologue: In the Stalls,” “To a  Dancer,” “Renée,” “Nora on the Pavement,” “Violet: Prelude,” “Violet: Air de Ballet,” “Violet: La Mélinite: Moulin Rouge,” “Violet: At the Ambassadeurs,” “Stella Maris,” “Hallucination: I,” “Hallucination: II,” “Flora of the Eden: Antwerp,” “White Heliotrope,” “Nerves,” “Madrigal: I,” “In the Sanctuary at Saronno,” “Bianca: Bianca,” “Bianca: Benedictine,” “Epilogue: Credo”
Symons—Fiction: “Esther Kahn,” “Christian Trevalga,” “The Death of Peter Waydelin”
[120 pages]

Week 6
Symons—Symbolist Movement in Literature
[178 pages]

Week 7
Olive Custance (Lady Alfred Douglas)—“Peacocks: A Mood,” “The Masquerade,” “Hyacinthus,” “The White Statue,” “Statues,” “Candle-Light,” “Pierrot”
Alice Meynell—“The Visiting Sea,” “The Young Neophyte,” “To the Body,” “Summer in England, 1914,” “The Threshing-Machine,” “Veni Creator”
Dollie Radford—“Spring-Song,” “Song,” “Return of the Troops”
Michael Field [Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper]—“From Baudelaire,” “The Poet,” “A Dance of Death,” “La Gioconda,” “A Dying Viper,” “Song” from “The Tragic Mary”
Charles Baudelaire—“Un Voyage à Cythère” [“A Voyage to Cythera”]
John Gray—“On a Picture,” “Poem,” “A Crucifix,” “Parsifal Imitated,” “Femmes Damnées,” “Le Voyage à Cythère,” “Mishka” Lionel Johnson—“The Cultured Faun,” “The Church of a Dream,” “Mystic and Cavalier,” “To a Passionist,” “In Honor of Dorian and His Creator,” “The Destroyer of a Soul,” “The Dark Angel,” “Nihilism,” “A Decadent’s Lyric”
Richard Le Gallienne—“The Décadent to His Soul”
Oscar Wilde—“Hélas,” “Requiescat,” “Symphony in Yellow,” “The Harlot’s House,” “On the Sale by Auction of Keats’ Love Letters,” “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”
[75 pages]

Week 8
George Egerton [Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright]—“Wedlock,” “The Little Gray Glove,” “A Lost Masterpiece”
Ella D'Arcy—“At Twickenham,” “The Death Mask,” “Irremediable”
Vernon Lee [Violet Paget]—“A Wedding Chest”
Ada Leverson—“The Quest of Sorrow”
Hubert Crackanthorpe—“Embers,” “Reticence in Literature”
[166 pages]

Week 9
Max Beerbohm—“A Defence of Cosmetics”
James McNeill Whistler—“Ten O’Clock Lecture” (1885)
Wilde—Introduction, “Dates in the Life of Oscar Wilde,” “The Critic As Artist,” “Soul of Man Under Socialism,” De Profundis, “Wildean Wit from Comedies,” “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young”
[446 pages]

Week 10
Wilde—from Complete Shorter Fiction: Introduction, “The Happy Prince,” “The Nightingale and the Rose,” “The Birthday of the Infanta,” “The Fisherman and His Soul,” “The Star-Child”; Picture of Dorian Gray
[340 pages]

Week 11
Wilde—Salome, The Importance of Being Ernest
Arthur Pinero—The Second Mrs. Tanqueray
[176 pages]

Week 12
Aubrey Beardsley—Salome pictures from Best of Beardsley
Symons—“Aubrey Beardsley,” “Studies in Strange Sins (After Beardsley’s Designs)”
[30 pages, plus 16 pictures]

Week 13
Aubrey Beardsley—“The Three Musicians,” “Ballad of the Barber,” The Story of Venus & Tannhäuser
Gray—“The Barber”
Susan Sontag—“Notes on Camp”
Beardsley—Best of Beardsley pictures (slides/reproductions & discussion)
[60 pages, plus approximately 50 pictures]
——LAST DATE FOR SUBMITTING DRAFT OF TERM PAPER——

Week 14
Beardsley’s Best of Beardsley pictures (continued) and other fin-de-siècle art and posters (slides/reproductions & discussion)
[approximately 50 pictures]

Week 15
Beardsley’s Best of Beardsley pictures (continued) and other fin-de-siècle art and posters (slides/reproductions & discussion)
[approximately 40 pictures]
——TERM PAPER DUE——