"Tolstoy and the Victorians" is the name I have given to a conceptual writing-intensive literature course I developed in the spring of 2016. The course is my attempt to implement the most current composition theory into a lit studies course, with the purpose of making undergraduate English studies more dynamic with regards to the types of writing that is performed in class. My aim for hybridity among composition theory and traditional literary studies is one that will hopefully result in students being able to experience continuity in writing instruction throughout their undergraduate career (reinforcing in the third year what is introduced in the first) as well as provide students with a more personalized literary experience that more effectively prepares them for careers outside of academia. The content of the course can be viewed on the course site.
The idea for TATV came into being in 2015. That was the year my interest in the 19th century broke out of England, spilling over into Russia after I read somewhere that Tolstoy was an admirer of George Eliot. Until then, it had never even crossed my mind that 19th century Russians, geographically so far removed, new anything of western literature, nor did I think that the Victorians cared much for Russia. Despite many references to almost every other part of the world, Russia seems strangely absent in the literature of the Victorians. For me, aside from Nabokov, who America gobbled up, Russia has always been a cultural blind spot. Russian history, not surprisingly, is not exactly emphasized in high schools across America. Even in a Middle Ages course I took as an undergraduate, a course theoretically based in Said and dedicated to alternative medieval histories, the huge swath of land between Mongolia and the middle east was rarely mentioned. Yet when I introduced myself to 19th Russian writers (beginning with Tolstoy), not knowing what to expect, I was surprised to find not foreignness, but a kind of familiarity that was almost banal. It seemed so...English. Or western, at least. Melville and Flaubert proved to be more exotic, Yet beneath the stylistic similarities that Anna Karenina shares with works of Eliot and Hardy, there is something else, something different and unique, that is taking shape and exerting its own influence on the western world, denying it primacy. After Anna Karenina, I read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls, and even though these works are more severe stylistic departures from western European writers (not a lot of graphic ax murders in Victorian fiction, unfortunately) I was still able to make strong connections with that exponent of Englishness, Charles Dickens. This all would make a cool course, I thought. But I stopped there, at simple recognition of similarity. I am now picking this idea back up and have attempted to develop simple recognition into something that can hopefully provide new ways of seeing ourselves, westerners, and new ways of reading.
The cultural context, key terms such as otherness, Orientalism (does this even apply?) what it means to be truly comparative, to really compare works, to read works alongside oneanother (Catherine Gallagher) How would I teach lit? How works act upon the worldn and creates knowledge, ideological communities – and how in turn our writing performs in a similar way.
The idea for TATV came into being in 2015. That was the year my interest in the 19th century broke out of England, spilling over into Russia after I read somewhere that Tolstoy was an admirer of George Eliot. Until then, it had never even crossed my mind that 19th century Russians, geographically so far removed, new anything of western literature, nor did I think that the Victorians cared much for Russia. Despite many references to almost every other part of the world, Russia seems strangely absent in the literature of the Victorians. For me, aside from Nabokov, who America gobbled up, Russia has always been a cultural blind spot. Russian history, not surprisingly, is not exactly emphasized in high schools across America. Even in a Middle Ages course I took as an undergraduate, a course theoretically based in Said and dedicated to alternative medieval histories, the huge swath of land between Mongolia and the middle east was rarely mentioned. Yet when I introduced myself to 19th Russian writers (beginning with Tolstoy), not knowing what to expect, I was surprised to find not foreignness, but a kind of familiarity that was almost banal. It seemed so...English. Or western, at least. Melville and Flaubert proved to be more exotic, Yet beneath the stylistic similarities that Anna Karenina shares with works of Eliot and Hardy, there is something else, something different and unique, that is taking shape and exerting its own influence on the western world, denying it primacy. After Anna Karenina, I read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls, and even though these works are more severe stylistic departures from western European writers (not a lot of graphic ax murders in Victorian fiction, unfortunately) I was still able to make strong connections with that exponent of Englishness, Charles Dickens. This all would make a cool course, I thought. But I stopped there, at simple recognition of similarity. I am now picking this idea back up and have attempted to develop simple recognition into something that can hopefully provide new ways of seeing ourselves, westerners, and new ways of reading.
The cultural context, key terms such as otherness, Orientalism (does this even apply?) what it means to be truly comparative, to really compare works, to read works alongside oneanother (Catherine Gallagher) How would I teach lit? How works act upon the worldn and creates knowledge, ideological communities – and how in turn our writing performs in a similar way.
Writing intensive portion founded in the idea of threshold concepts
as iterated in Naming What We Know (2012)
meta concept: “Writing is an activity and a subject of study”
– we will use writing to do things, talk about literature, but the course will
also focus on studying our writing in and of itself, as something more than a
medium, rather a malleable tool that we can refine and develop.
C.1 Writing is a social and rhetorical activity – synthesize
with Bakhtin – the heteroglot and response theory
C.2 Writing speaks to situations through recognizable forms –
synth with Bazerman/Literate Action “Knowing where you are” but also connect
back up to top – how genres are enacted/performed which is in congruence with
Judith Butler’s theories of performativity. Syth with texts – to what extent is
the novel a recognizable form and how does this inform the questions we ask of
it? Our expectations? How is Tolstoy trying to enact the recognizable form of
the serialized British novel? How is he pushing past those limits and creating
something new?
C.3 Writing enacts and creates identities and ideologies –
syth with the novels and LS theories of nationalism (Benedict Anderson) and the
Frankfurt school, Adorno, Marxism etc. Link back to C.1 and C.2 as social, yet
also link back to Fulkerson where writing is determined by ideologies (can you
reverse this concept?) and especially epistemology. And comeing full circle
back to BA, What ideologies/identities are created with the novels?
C.4 All writers have more to learn – basic concept of this
course is that you are not achieving an ideal, you are continually progressing.
Link to C.1 and the dialectic, how that is always improving us, and link to the
rhetorical stance of Noviceship in WAC
C.5 Writing is (also always) a cognitive activity – link with
LS psychoanalysis, Bloom “emboidied cognition” and how writing assignments can
utilize these theorhetical lenses. Talk about the inherent tension (possibly)
between C.1 and C.5 – they are the two poles – the social (the heteroglot) and
the individual
Link to discourse activities
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