Reading Victorians

Undergraduate

The seminar’s heart is two big Victorian novels: Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Many cultural observers feel that recent technological and pedagogical developments have created a crisis in humanities education. We also consider how these novels raise questions about Victorian political, social, and cultural history. We study nineteenth-century reading practices. Students do some research using contemporary newspapers and journals. We also take a step back to consider how 21st-century reading practices might distance us from 19th-century cultural products. Enrollment limited to first-year students. HU TTh 2:35pm-3:50pm