rbuurma

The Rise of the Novel (ENGL 035CC)

We tend to imagine that literature exists to represent and communicate human experience. But literary forms like the novel also help provide the deep structure of our everyday experience. This course covers the long history of the novel as both a representation of social life and the scaffolding on which which we build our experience of the world. Beginning from the novel's eighteenth-century origins, we explore its Victorian and Modernist incarnations, its post-colonial and post-modernist reconfigurations, and end with the near-present.

This course includes

• close attention and careful reading of landmark canonical novels and authors (like Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Samuel Richardson's Pamela, Frances Burney's Evelina, Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, Charles Dickens's stories, Elizbeth Gaskell's Cranford, Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, Henry James's Daisy Miller, James Joyce's

rbuurma

##The Rise of the Novel (core course)

A course on the long history of the novel, stretching from its eighteenth-century origins to its Victorian and Modernist incarnations through its post-colonial and post-modernist reconfigurations.

Includes

• close attention to careful reading of landmark canonical novels and authors (like Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Samuel Richardson's Pamela, Frances Burney's Evelina, Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, Charles Dickens's stories, Elizbeth Gaskell's Cranford, Henry James's Daisy Miller, James Joyce's Ulysses, and V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas)
• a survey of the main critical and theoretical approaches to the novel
• investigation of printing and publication history
• introductory text-mining techniques (no experience required, but optional final projects involving advanced work possible.)

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Critical Making: Telegraph + Twitter Swarthmore College Spring 2014 Dates (tentative, subject to change):Friday 1-3 pm, Jan 23, Feb 6, 20, March 6, 20, April 3, 17 Available for .5 credit or non-credit group independent study contact rbuurma1@swarthmore.edu to express interest

Faculty of record: Rachel Sagner Buurma (English) Consulting faculty and staff: Andrew Ruether (ITS), Kevin Webb (Computer Science)

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English 40: Victorian Literature + Victorian Informatics

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instructor: Rachel Sagner Buurma semester: Fall 2014 time: W 1:15-4, plus occasional labs tba location: McCabe Library Video Classroom (third floor)

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This mid-level core course offers a survey of canonical Victorian literature through the lens of Victorian information theories and knowledge organization practices. Reading texts like Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H., Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, John Henry Newman’s The Idea of the University, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, we will investigate the relation between information, knowledge, and literature: how did Victorians imagine literature as information? And how do new literary-critical methods of interpretation draw on the idea of lit