English 9068
The Shock of the Old: Forms of Victorian Anachronism
Instructor: Professor Matthew Rowlinson.
Fall Half Course.
This course will have as its central concern the shock of modernity as it shapes mid-Victorian texts and images in a variety of genres. Marx and Walter Benjamin both argued that bourgeois revolutions are typically represented through anachronism; it was in writing about the French revolution of 1848 and its aftermath, which seemed to repeat the events of 1789 and the Napoleonic counter-revolution, that Marx coined his well known aphorism about historical events that happen twice, once as tragedy and once as farce. Our theoretical reading on anachronism will come from this work of Marx and from Benjamin; it will also include Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the work on repetition and trauma that shaped Benjamin’s work on shock. In literature, we will focus on writing published in the 1850’s but shaped by anachronism and/or traumatic repetition. These texts will include Tennyson’s poem “Maud,” Dickens’ Bleak House, selections from John Ruskin, including “The Nature of Gothic,” Fors Clavigera, and “The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century” and poetry in translation by Charles Baudelaire. Our work in the term will close with consideration of anachronism in Victorian visual culture including images from pre-Raphaelite painting and photography by Julia Margaret Cameron. As well as contextualizing these works as responses to political and economic shock, we also consider how they register the ecological shock of the fossil fuel extraction and
combustion--itself a form of anachronistic consumption of energetic residue from earlier geological eras.
