801A: Theoretical Approaches to Print Culture, 1700-1900
Fall 1999
Dr. Leith Davis
email: leith@sfu.ca
web site:
http://www.sfu.ca/personal/leithDescription
This course is an introduction to a number of the theoretical approaches used in studies of print culture. It will be structured around 3 modules, each taught by a different faculty member an focused on a different theoretical issue: the making of the author (and of literature), nationalism and colonialism, and the production of culture. Readings for each module will include both theoretical and primary texts. In addition, a series of guest lectures (some with short accompanying readings) will broaden the historical and theoretical base of the course. Assignments will arise out of the 3 modules, and will include one research project based on our library's Special Collections or another primary source. Thus, while introducing students to the history of print culture 1700-1900, the course will also serve as an orientation to debates about the implications of the various critical approaches that can be adopted to this period. We will be pursuing questions about what it means to study literature in terms of history, how specific texts can be situated within a particular field of cultural production, and the ways that specific cultural fields are themselves shaped by wider struggles over different forms of cultural and civic authority.
Course Schedule
General Introduction
Sept. 10: Introduction of students, faculty, and course
12:00-1:00 Online research workshop - Instructor Marie Krbavac AQ3148
break
1:30-2:30 "FirstClass" workshop Instructor Rob McTavish - AQ3148
2:45 Debriefing back in AQ 6093: discussion of assignments, etc.
Module 1: The Literary Marketplace and the
Construction of the Author (Schellenberg)
Sept. 17: Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?"
Terry Belanger, "Publishers and Writers in Eighteenth-Century England"
Martha Woodmansee, "Genius and the Copyright"
Case study: John Dryden
1:302:30 introduction to SFU Special Collections
Jared Curtis and Gene Bridwell
2:30 library on-line resources workshop -
Heather-Ann Tingley LB 4009
Sept. 24: 11:30-13:00 Website program workshop
Instructor Marie Krbavac AQ3145.2
1:30-3:30 AQ 6093
Mark Rose, The Invention of Copyright
Case study: Alexander Pope; Stephen Duck; Mary Collier
Oct. 1: Catherine Gallagher, Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820, Introduction, ch. 1,4,5
Case study: Aphra Behn; Anne Finch; Charlotte Lennox; Frances Burney; Frances Brooke
Oct. 8: John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, ch. 1&2
Case study: Gray; Barbauld
Guest seminar: Paul Dutton (History) and Paul Budra, "Manuscript and Early Print Culture in England"
Oct. 15: At UBC: UBC library Special Collections, microfilm, online
resources
Module 2: Nationalism, Colonialism
and the Production of Literature (Davis)
Oct. 22: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities
Homi K. Bhabha, "Dissemination: Time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation"
Case Study: Robert Burns
Oct. 29: Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race Gender and
Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (excerpts)
R. Radhakrishnan, "Nationalism, Gender, and Narrative"
Joseph Valente, "The Myth of Sovereignty: Gender in the
Literature of Irish Nationalism"
Case Study: Sydney Owenson
Guest seminar: Carole Gerson, "Colonial Print Culture"
Nov. 5: Guest seminar: Jerome McGann
(readings: "Radiant Textuality," "The Rationale of Hypertext")
Nov. 12: Srinivas Aravamuden, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and
Agency, 1688-1804 (excerpt)
Paul Gilroy, "The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of
Modernity"
Case Study: Olaudah Equiano
Module 3: The Production of Culture (Linley)
Nov. 19: 9:30-11:30 - Follow-up website workshop
Instructor Marie Krbavac AQ 3145.2
Guest seminar: Mary Ann Gillies, "The Production of
Literature to the Turn of the Twentieth Century"
David Lloyd and Paul Thomas, Culture and the State (excerpts)
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (excerpts)
Case study: Matthew Arnold and William Morris
Nov. 26: Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late 1980s"
Isobel Armstrong, "Transparency: Towards a Poetics of Glass in the Nineteenth Century"
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, "The End of the Book? Some Perspectives on Media Change."
Case study: Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin
Dec. 3: Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks (excerpts)
John Guillory, Cultural Capital, Ch. 5
Case study: Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Research presentations
Evaluation
Preparation and participation 15%
Seminar Presentations
(one presentation per module, 10% each) 30%
Final essay (12 pages) 35%
(Note students may select to have the additional 25% distributed evenly between their seminars; added to the final seminar which will involve a webpage; or added to the final paper)
Assignments
1. Participation and Preparation - 15%
- includes attendance, reading preparation, class participation,
2. Seminar Presentations - 30%
- The seminar presentations are intended to focus on the case study readings, relating them to the theoretical readings for the week. Individual module instructors will provide students with further guidance regarding selection of readings and topics. Students will sign up for all of their seminar presentations in the first course meeting. The final seminar will involve the construction and presentation of a website to the class.
3. Final Essay - 30% - due December 17
-The final assignment will be based on a primary text which the student has selected from special collections, microfilm, or an on-line source
- this 12-page paper must meet the criteria for a coherent, well-argued critical research essay. The argument should focus theoretical and historical concerns of the course on the primary text the student has selected. Papers may be submitted in either print or hypertext formats.
- students are strongly encouraged to submit paper proposals to the course coordinator by the last day of classes. Essay topics must be approved by the course coordinator by the last day of classes.
-Essays are to be submitted to the course coordinator; each essay will be read by 2 of the course instructors.