123042 PS Proseminar Literature (2011W)

In a 1912 letter to Virginia Woolf, the English literary critic and biographer Lytton Strachey described the Victorians as "a set of mouthing bungling hypocrites; but perhaps really there is a baroque charm about them which will be discovered by our great-great-grandchildren." Indeed, the term 'Victorian' as an interpretive category still looms large in contemporary debates on gender, ethics, 'high' and popular culture, and the multiple recent appropriations of Victorian texts, themes and images by writers, filmmakers, historians and cultural critics have led to the rise of a new discipline known as 'Neo-Victorian Studies.'

In this class we will explore the Victorian Age and its intriguing 20th- and 21st-century afterlives by discussing not only some of the classic texts of Victorian poetry, drama and narrative fiction but also well-known texts of Neo-Victorian fiction, such as John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) or A.S. Byatt's Possession (1990), in their historical, cultural and theoretical contexts. When analysing Oscar Wilde's comedy An Ideal Husband, we will have the chance of seeing the Akademietheater production of the play in Elfriede Jelinek's new adaptation.

Please note: students are expected to present 15-minute papers at a 'mini-conference' scheduled for Saturday, 14 January (10am-4pm); this means that there will be no classes on 3 November and 19 January. Attendance of the mini-conference is compulsory!