ENL 6256:
TOWARD MODERNISM: COLONIZING MONSTROSITY
IN THE VICTORIAN FIN DE SIÈCLE
Dr. C. Snodgrass; 4336
Turlington; 376-8362 (home); snod@english.ufl.edu
© Chris Snodgrass 2010
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course will focus on the period
from roughly 1880 to 1910, which was fixated on “modernity” and has long been
characterized as a time of “transition” from a high Victorian to a Modernist
world view. We will investigate
particularly three notable fascinations in late-Victorian culture: (1) the
concept of ‘the New’ — New Spirit, New Hedonism, New Paganism, New Fiction, New
Drama, New Humor, New Realism, and perhaps especially New Woman; (2) the implicit
tension between the traditional and the transient, between history and
aestheticized or ‘suspended’ time; and not least (3) the grotesque or
‘monstrous’ — reflecting animality, freakishness, deformity, disease,
degeneration, corruption, perversion, or decadence — regardless of whether the
ostensible subject was a threatening Other or mainstream culture. Indeed, the prevalence with which
fin-de-siècle artists tended to associate ‘modernity’ with these
themes/concerns suggests an implicit attempt almost to colonize (control and
order) the New, the temporal, and the ‘monstrous’ so as to avoid the equivalent
of a kind of “post-colonial” metaphysical chaos. What is the nature of that controlling,
ordering, encoding, technique — and how it anticipates Modernism, broadly
defined — will be this course’s underlying focus.
The course will survey a broad
range of noteworthy texts, both written and visual, by familiar figures such as
Ruskin, Pater, Wilde, Beardsley, and Yeats, as well as relatively unfamiliar
(“non-canonical”) writers, among them Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson, Mathilda
Blind, Victoria Cross, Vernon Lee [Violet Paget], Ella D’Arcy, George Egerton [Mary Chavelita Dunne], Graham R. Tomson
[Rosamund Marriott-Watson], Michael Field [ and Edith Cooper], Henry Harland,
Count Eric Stenbock, and Baron Corvo [Frederick Rolfe], as well as number of
Victorian painters and cartoonists. The
visual images that bombarded the late-Victorian period will be considered as
texts equal in interest to written texts.
While most of the weekly assignments do
not explicitly include critical theory — and a sophisticated knowledge of
literary theory is in no way a prerequisite — you will be encouraged to employ
whatever theoretical perspectives you know to help illuminate the issues under
study.
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.