English 535: Studies in the Nineteenth Century

The Culture of Listening: Audience and Consumption in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle

Prof. Kevin McNeilly

This seminar will focus on the emergence of apparatuses of listening and reception in the late nineteenth century in late imperial Western Europe, and on the impact of those technologies on the practice of poetry. New conceptions of a public as consumers, decadents, aesthetes, flâneurs and philistines run parallel to the marketing and widespread use of new forms of recording and transmission, from gramophones to telegraphs, which affected ideas of voice and voicing. In addition, movements in arts and crafts – including presses like the Yeats sisters’ Cuala Press and William Morris’s Kelmscott Press – suggest an attention to the material fact of the book, and to editing as an engaged form of audience, that corresponds to a vital re-imaging of the speaking or writing subject as listener. Stylistic innovations, remarkable for example in the publication of Charlotte Mew’s work (intersecting with the New Woman movement) or in Robert Bridges’ edition of Gerard Manley Hopkins, only heighten tensions over gender, nation and the reading public – tensions that inform Walter Benjamin’s recently translated Arcades Project, which we will use as a guide to the problematics of consumption and reading that inform a new cultural poetics, and to the emergence of literary and cultural studies on the national scenes. An investigation of the work of William Butler Yeats, as last Romantic, late Victorian and emergent Modernist, will frame the seminar.

Seminar Schedule
Wednesday September 7
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
Click here for the homepage of The Walter Benjamin research Syndicate.
Click here for "Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project and Contemporary Cultural Debate in the West" by CHRISTOPHER ROLLASON.
Click here for "Life in the Jaws of the Crocodile: Walter Benjamin's Last Project," a review by Bill Nygren.
Click here for "Gone Shopping: The Arcades Project," a review by Guy Mannes Abbott.
Click here for "Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project," a nearly unreadable fluourescent page by Esther Leslie.
Click here for "From 'Rausch' to Rebellion: Walter Benjamin's On Hashish and the Aesthetic Dimensions of Prohibitionist Realism" by Scott J. Thompson.
Click here for "On Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project: Two Views" by Roy Brand and Morgan Meis (a *.pdf file).
Click here for "Aesthetics after the end of art: an interview with Susan Buck-Morss - Aesthetics and the Body Politic - Interview" by Grant H. Kester (Art Journal, Spring 1997).
Click here for "All About the Benjamins: The Bookworm and the Angel" by Howard Hampton (The Village Voice, 3 March 2003).
Click here for "Reclaiming the Fragments: On the Messianic Materialism of Walter Benjamin" by Stephen Bronner.
Click here for the Literary Encyclopedia entry on The Arcades Project.
Click here for"Benjamin, the televisual and the 'fascistic subject'" by Allen Meek.
Click here for "Walter Benjamin for Historians" by VANESSA R. SCHWARTZ.
Wednesday September 14
William Blake, ed. W. B. Yeats
Seminar Presentation: Lisa Szabo
Please read the fragments and couplets and the prose fragments in the selected Blake. Please read also The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and the Songs of Experience, as well as Yeats's introduction and notes.
Click here for The William Blake Archive.
Click here for a "web museum" of William Blake.
Click here for the Blake Digital Text Project.
Click here for a brief biographical overview of Blake.
Click here for the Victorin Web page on Algernon Charles swinburne, which contains some references to Swinburne's work on Blake.
Click here for "Swinburne's Radical Artifice; or, The Comedian as A. C." by Jerome McGann.
Click here for "William Blake and the Study of Virtual Space: Adapting 'The Crystal Cabinet' to a New Medium" by Steve Guynup, University of Baltimore.
Click here for "Hypercontextualizing the Work of William Blake" by Rachel Kathryn Onuf.
Click here for "Blake's Poetics of Sound in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" by Susan P. Reilly.
Click here for "Digital Blake" by J. Hillis Miller.
Wednesday September 21
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Seminar Presentation: Allen Roberts
In addition to general reading from Rossetti's poems, please read the preface to the first edition of Rossetti's The Early Italian Poets, 239-41.
Click here for "IMAGINING WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW: THE THEORETICAL GOALS OF THE ROSSETTI ARCHIVE" by JEROME McGANN.
Click here for The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Hypermedia Research Archive.
Click here for a "web museum" of some of Rossetti's paintings.
Click here for the selected poetry of Rossetti, from U of T's "Representative Poetry Online."
Click here for a set of excerpts from a translation of Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator."
Click here for "MELANCHOLIA, MOURNING AND THE TASK OF THE TRANSLATOR" by Adam Rosen.
Click here for the entry on Walter Benjamin from The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism.
Click here for "We, the Future of Jacques Derrida," an editorial (mentioning Derrida's essay on Benjamin, "Des Tours De Babel") by Eyal Amiran for a special issue of the e-journal Postmodern Culture dedicated to Derrida.
Click here for "Walter Pater's 'Dante Gabriel Rossetti' versus His 'Aesthetic Poetry'" by Andrew Leng.
Click here for Walter Pater's essay "Dante Gabriel Rossetti."
Click here for a review of Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation by Umberto Eco.
Wednesday September 28
Walter Pater
Seminar Presentation: Toby Chernoff
Please read the Introduction, Preface and Conclusion to The Renaissance, as well as the essay on Pico della Mirandola.
Click here for the full text of Pater's The Renaissance, along with selections from other works by and on Pater.
Click here for an e-text of "Pico della Mirandola."
Click here for the entry on Pater from The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism.
Click here for "a web guide to Walter Pater from literaryhistory.com."
Click here for a biography and bibliography of Pater.
Click here for a page called "Selected Poetry of Walter Pater," which is actually a set of links from the U of T library page to three significant essays by Pater, from his Appreciations.
Click here for the entry on Pater from the Literary Encyclopedia.
Click here for the electronic full text of the critical volume Pater in the 1990s, edited by Laurel Brake & Ian Small.
(Click here for the table of contents for Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire; note the essay by Kit Andrews, "Walter Pater and Walter Benjamin: The Diaphanous Collector and the Angel of History.")
Wednesday October 5
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Seminar Presentation: Lynn Wang
Click here for the Hopkins page on the Victorian Web.
Click here for an on-line version of Hopkins' Poems. (Note, as well, the images of holograph drafts of several of Hopkins' poems.)
Click here for "Electronic resources related to G.M. Hopkins (1844-89) and his poetry."
Click here for the Hopkins page at Representative Poetry Online.
Click here for a page on Hopkins at the Academy of American Poets site.
Click here for "a web guide to Gerard Manley Hopkins from literaryhistory.com."
Wednesday October 12
Charlotte Mew
Seminar Presentation: Amanda Lewis
Please read all of Mew's poetry, and her short story "Elinor."
Click here for a page dedicated to Charlotte Mew's work.
Click here for a few of Mew's poems on-line.
Click here for a bibliography of Mew at the British Library.
Click here for "Small Wonder," an article on Mew by Brad Leithauser.
Click here for a "Charlotte Mew Chronology."
Click here for "The Death of a Poet" by Penelope Fitzgerald.
Wednesday October 19
W. B. Yeats
Please read "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," and the poems from The Wind in the Reeds, Responsibilities, The Tower, and Last Poems, as well as the 1937 "Introduction" to his poetry (all in The Yeats Reader).
Click here for an on-line version of Yeats's Collected Poems.
Click here for other e-texts of Yeats's early poems.
Click here for the homepage of the Sligo Yeats Society, from Sligo, Ireland.
Click here for a brief overview of Yeats's career.
Click here for an official page on Yeats's 1923 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Click here for a Selected Bibliography on Yeats.
Click here for an audio clip from a lecture by Yeats broadcast on the BBC, 11 October 1936.
Click here for Yeats's obituary from the New York Times, 30 January 1939.
Wednesday October 26
William Blake, ed. W. B. Yeats
Please read the selections from Jerusalem, the prose fragments, and peruse the Songs of Innocence and Experience.
Please also look through the sections of the Arcades Project on "Boredom, Eternal Return" (Convolute D), Baudelaire (Convolute J), Photography (Convolute Y)
Wednesday November 2
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Please read "Jenny," "Hand and Soul," and "The Stealthy School of Criticism" from the Collected Poetry and Prose.
Seminar Presentation: Toby Chernoff
Wednesday November 9
Walter Pater
Seminar Presentation: Ling Wang
Please read "The School of Giorgione" in Pater's Renaissance and "Joachim du Bellay."
You can also read "The Condition to Which All Art Aspires: Reflections on Pater on Music" by Patricia Herzog in the British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 36, No. 2, April 1996.
Please also look at Convolute S "Painting, Jugendstil, Novelty" from the Arcades Project.
Wednesday November 16
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Seminar Presentation: Allen Roberts
Wednesday November 23
Charlotte Mew
Seminar Presentation: Lisa Szabo
Wednesday November 30
W. B. Yeats
Seminar Presentation: Amanda Lewis
Please read Deirdre. Please skim the poems and the following essays: "Ireland and the Arts," "The Reform of the Theatre," "First Principles," "The Tragic Theatre," and the "Introduction to Plays."
If you would like to, you could also skim these myths of Deirdre and the Sons of Usnech at Deirdre--or, The Exile of the Sons of Usnech and Deirdre.