Learning Outcomes:
• Identify the role of key scientific debates in the works of nineteenth-century writers
• Argue with critical awareness about cultural, social, historical and literary significance of such debates for the nineteenth century and for today
• Demonstrate understanding of nineteenth-century literary and scientific culture and its role in shaping our world
• Analyse literary strategies in scientific texts from the period in an informed way
• Demonstrate analytical, critical and writing skills including the ability to produce an essay demonstrating knowledge of key points noted above.
Indicative Module Content:
SEMINAR 1: Introduction Literature and Science? Literature or Science?: Our Terms of Debate
Core Texts: ‘Prologue’ from Laura Otis, ed. Literature and Science in the 19th Century, pp
3-8 with theoretical material from George Levine, ‘One Culture’ and Thomas Kuhn, from The Stucture of Scientific Revolutions
SEMINAR 2: Facts and Faith: Deep Time and Planetary Consciousness
Core Texts: Charles Lyell, from Principles of Geology in Otis, ed., Literature 'and Science, pp246-252; Gosse, from Father and Son (in Norton); George Levine, ‘One Culture’
SEMINAR 3: God and Nature still at strife?: Death, Mourning and The Body
Core Text: Tennyson, from In Memoriam (in Norton)
SEMINAR 4: Individual and the Species: Evolution and The Stories We Tell Ourselves
Core Texts: Darwin from Origin of Species and Descent of Man (in Norton) and Gillian Beer, from Darwin’s Plots
SEMINAR 5: Man the Animal: The Body in the World
Core Texts: Browning, ‘Caliban upon Setebos’ (in Norton)
SEMINAR 6: Logic, Origins and Ends: Our Need for Nonsense
Core Texts: Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
and Edward Lear, from A book of Nonsense (1861) at http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/BoN/index.html
SEMINAR 7: Ways of Seeing: Perception and Fact
Core Texts: George Eliot, The Lifted Veil; Mesmerism and Magnetism section of Otis, Literature and Science, pp391-110; Armstrong ‘The microscope: mediations of the sub-visible world’
SEMINAR 8: Bodies, Minds, Desire and Disease: The role of the Gothic
Core Text: ‘Carmilla’ from Sheridan Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly; Henry Maudsley, from Body and Mind in Otis, pp364-69; Frances Power Cobbe, ‘Unconscious Cerebration’ in Otis, pp424-427.
SEMINAR 9: New Worlds: Race and Experiment
Core Texts H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr Moreau (1896); Section on Otis on Race.
SEMINAR 10: Conclusion and review: Enviornmental Consciousness
Core Texts: Ruskin, ‘Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century’ (in Norton)