Course Syllabus

Course Syllabus & Information

This schedule lists readings, not lecture schedule. Although lecture follows the order of readings here, it keeps to its own pace...lecture covers material read the week before.

This schedule is to allow you to structure your reading of the course material. Following this reading schedule will ensure that you are always one week ahead of lecture.

[Page numbers are from the Longman Anthology.]

SCHEDULE OF READINGS

Course Week One
Perspectives: 1137

Charles Darwin
On the Origin of Species .... 1357

Charles Dickens
A Christmas Carol 1464 (w.1520)

Course Week Two
Fanny Kemble 1140
Parliamentary Papers 1143
Henry Mayhew 1158

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
The Kiss 1718
The Burden of Ninevah 1719

Christina Rossetti
Goblin Market 1731

Robert Browning
Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came 1427

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The Charge of the Light Brigade 1291
The Higher Pantheism + Response 1327-8
The Lady of Shalott 1235

Course Week Three
Lewis Caroll
Jaberwocky 1812

Rudyard Kipling
Without Benefit of Clergy 1860
Gunga Din 1882

Course Week Four
Algernon Charles Swinburne
The Leper 1767

Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Windhover, Pied Beauty 1794

Moral Verses 1826-1848

Course Week Five
Charles Darwin
from The Descent of Man (1365-1368 only)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
To George Sand x2 1198
Aurora Leigh 1203

Course Weeks Six to Seven
Longman Supplement
Jekyll and Hyde/The Secret Sharer/ Transformation: Three Tales of Doubles

Course Week Eight
Matthew Arnold
Dover Beach 1662
Culture & Anarchy: from Sweetness & Light 1695

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
A Scandal in Bohemia 1556

Course Week Nine
John Henry, Cardinal Newman
from Apologia Pro Vita Sua 1390
Thomas Henry Huxley
from Evolution & Ethics 1398

Elizabeth Gaskell
Our Society at Cranford 1522

Course Week Ten
Thomas Hardy
The Withered Arm 1538

Course Week Eleven
John Ruskin
from The Stones of Venice 1580-1590
Florence Nightingale
Cassandra 1608
Perspectives
Victorian Ladies & Gentlemen 1626
Sarah Ellis 1632
John Henry, Cardinal Newman 1638
Queen Victoria 1651

Course Week Twelve
Oscar Wilde
The Importance of Being Earnest 2003

Max Beerbohm
Enoch Soames 2091

Course Week Thirteen
Review and Recapitulation

[Lecture slides will be made available online 48 hours before the Final Exam]

COURSE Q&A

The last five minutes of each Wednesday's lecture (& the five minutes following) will be used for an open Q&A with the Instructor. Any questions relating to the course, or debate on any of the ideas, are welcome. If you have no questions on the day, you are quite free to leave....

Schedule of Assignment Due Dates:
[Details of the separate assignments listed in "Pertinent & Impertinent" links.

Nb: There is a five percent per day late penalty for all assignments, documented medical or bereavement leave excepted. For medical exemptions, provide a letter (not a note) on a Physician's or Surgeon's letterhead which declares his or her medical judgement that illness or injury prevented work on the assignment. The letter must cover the entire period over which the assignment was scheduled and may be verified by telephone. For bereavement leave, simply provide, ex post facto, a copy of the order of service or other published notice of remembrance.

January 26th or 28th: Group Project Proposal due in seminar.
February 18th: Close-Reading Project: due in lecture.
February 19th: Mid-Term Essay topics posted.
March 4th: Mid-Term Essay due in lecture.
March 30th or April 1st: Group Project due in-seminar.
April 15th 8:30-11:30: Final Exam.

Grading Bonus: Lecture Attendance & Punctuality
Attendance and punctuality are both virtues that the professional world expects. Lateness and unpunctuality are penalised in the professional sphere and censured in the private. To help promote these real-world virtues, a grading bonus is available to the class. If high attendance (measured by unpredictable attendance checks) and negligible unpunctuality (based on the Lecturer's observation) is maintained in lecture throughout the Term, the grades on the Mid-Term essays will be retroactively raised to the next grade level at the end of Term. (I.e. C+ becomes B-, and so on.)

Research material is available on Library Reserve.

Nb: “Participation requires both attendance and punctuality ."

Instructor Contact:
Office Hours: AQ 6094 -- Monday and Wednesday ten thirty to noon, Tuesday noon to three o'clock. Bring your coffee and discuss course matters freely. E-mail to ogden@sfu.ca, Phone 778-782-5820

Course Approach:
Surveying, analysing, understanding and enjoying the vast empire of literature in the nineteenth century, concentrating on the material written under the majestic matriarch, Victoria Regina. Attendance and engagement in lecture, discussion and exchange in seminar, careful and close reading of course material, and group study and presentation of contemporary Victorian cool are the requirements of the course.