English 190

Other Readings and Media

Charles Dickens:  A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.  A course reader.

Description

In this seminar we will study some of the late Dickens novels: A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, and the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood. We will spread out Our Mutual Friend—the longest of the four—over the course of the term, so as to approximate the experience of reading a serialized novel over a period of months. Concurrently, we will move chronologically through the other three, spending more time on Great Expectations than on the other two. 

Part of the thrill of reading Dickens novels is that they give us an incredible array of things to think about. The seminar will focus some on the instructor’s primary interest in the novels: their dependence on complex, layered patterning that makes them feel, paradoxically, simultaneously sprawling and tight. We will also engage with a diverse selection of other kinds of criticism on the novels. What about Dickens late novels, in particular, makes them ready to be co-opted by so many different, sometimes mutually exclusive, theoretical schools?

English 190 replaced English 100 and 150 as of Fall '09. English majors may fulfill the seminar requirement for the major by taking one section of English 190 (or by having taken either English 100 or English 150 before Fall '09). Please read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in, or wait-listing for, this course.