Studies in 18th-Century Literature (441-0-20)
Topic
Antirealism
Instructors
Helen F Thompson
Meeting Info
University Hall 418: Tues 2:00PM - 4:50PM
Overview of class
This seminar will reexamine two commonplaces in the history of the British novel: that early prose narrative was driven by the rise of empiricism and observational science; and that Restoration and eighteenth-century prose forms led straight to the representational mode known as realism. We begin the seminar by querying accounts of the rise of the New Science based on its strict privileging of sensory data and refusal of imperceptible or "occult" causes. Along with alternative accounts of embodied artisanal knowledge and micromatter, we will also ponder environmental determinism (which antedates the concept of biological race) and the structuring mandates of mercantile capitalism, extraction, and exploitation. The seminar will confront the constitutive repression of the history of the slave trade in the long eighteenth-century archive, which will enable us critically to appraise dominant conceptions of the eighteenth-century "real" and attune us to speculative and/ or recuperative interventions in that reality's textual consolidation through the present day. We will read prose narratives to ponder the strategies through which they claim to represent the real, with special attention to empirical perception and its limits. Are these texts' representational, formal, and political claims based solely on phenomenal experience, plenitude of naturalistic detail, or verisimilitude? Can we locate other, even anti-realist modes through which eighteenth-century prose forms transmit meaning?
Class Materials (Required)
Primary texts include (list subject to revision): Robert Hooke, Micrographia (1665);
Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society (1667); Nicole Aljoe, Early Caribbean Digital Archive; [anonymous,] The London Jilt (1683); [anonymous,] Aristotle's Masterpiece (1684); Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (1688); William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World (1697); Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1721) and defense of the Royal African Company monopoly; Eliza Haywood, The Adventures of Eovaai (1736); [anonymous,] The Woman of Colour (1808); Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814).
Scholars and theorists include (list subject to revision): Nicole Aljoe; Srinivas Aravamudan; Franz Fanon; Simon Gikandi; Lynn Festa; Saidiya Hartman; Fredric Jameson; Bruno Latour; Georg Lukács; Michael McKeon; Edward Said; Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer; Pamela H. Smith; Hortense Spillers; Ian Watt; Roxann Wheeler.