This course explores a time
when the disciplinary boundaries separating literature, science, technology,
and criticism had not solidified into their modern form. In the early decades
of the nineteenth century, science was very much a part of culture, an aspect
of the larger intellectual life, not a separate sphere reserved for specialists.
Journals carried scientific papers side by side with political articles, poetry,
and criticism, while novelists, politicians, and natural philosophers mingled
together at the same clubs, attended the same lectures, and read the same books.
For example, Sir Walter Scott served a term as President of the chief scientific
society in Scotland, and Charles Babbage, the famous mathematician and pioneer
of computer science, knew Dickens well. Although disciplinary distinctions began
to emerge during the second half of the century, the split between what C. P.
Snow called the "two cultures" did not become an unbridgeable gulf
until well into the twentieth century.
In this class we shall use the methods of cultural studies and cultural history to analyze the complex relations between novels and natural philosophy in the Victorian era. Each week a literary text will be set in the context not only of scientific developments but also of Victorian engineering triumphs (railroads, steams ships, bridges, tunnels), emerging communications networks (the postal system, telegraph, telephone), consumer architecture (the Crystal Palace, department stores, shopping arcades), and new media (the stereoscope, photography, phonograph).
Readings inthe fiction of the period will include Charlotte Bronte's The Professor; Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race; Wilkie Collins, Heart and Science; Dickens's "Mudfog Papers" and Hard Times; George Eliot's Middlemarch; Gaskell's "Cousin Phyllis"; Hardy's Two on a Tower; W. H. Hudson, A Crystal Age; Thomas Love Peacock, Crotchet Castle; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; and Bram Stoker, Dracula . Students will also read excerpts from scientific texts by Charles Lyell, Mary Somerville, Charles Darwin, and Thomas Huxley, and study the engineering achievements of George Stephenson, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and Joseph Paxton; critical theory by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Jonathan Crary, and Bruno Latour; and history of science by Susan Faye Cannon, Richard Yeo, Alison Winter, and James A. Secord.
| Jay Clayton |
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