Two great nineteenth-century novels: Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1848) and Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886). Though they don't need to have anything in common—except their greatness—they do have a few similarities. Emily Bronte published her novel using a pseudonym, Ellis Bell, presumably to avoid being identified as a woman. Hardy published The Mayor of Casterbridge using his own name—but his first novel was presumed by several reviewers to be by George Eliot, who was in real life Mary Anne Evans. Both Wuthering Heights and The Mayor of Casterbridge have strong, overbearing, and sometimes violent men as their central characters. Both novels are set in richly described English places. Both have sometimes been called “tragedies.”
But we won't be comparing them. We will be reading each of them closely and carefully. We will have as our goal to understand and appreciate them.
We will talk our way through each novel in its turn, but you need to have read each of them completely by the time we have been talking about it for three weeks.
Requirements for this course are serious and timely reading, class participation, weekly in-class “scribbles,” and a seminar paper on some aspect or aspects of one of our novels. When you turn in your seminar papers, you will also turn in your weekly “scribbles,” which will count as your (ungraded) Hausarbeiten.
Expect to enjoy your reading, and our discussions. And expect to want to go visit Wuthering Heights, in Yorkshire, and Casterbridge, in Hardy's Wessex. You'll know Penistone Crags when you see it, and you will even recognise the wind our on the moors. And you'll have no trouble finding Michael Henchard's house, or the King's Arms, or Maumbury Ring or Maiden Castle.
We will use the inexpensive Wordsworth Classics editions of both novels. Please use these texts, so that we can all sit in the kitchen at the Heights on p. , or Hardy's description of the Ring at Casterbridge on p. 54. |
