Taking its cue from the ubiquity of visual media in today’s Western cultures, this seminar investigates Victorian literary texts alongside media innovations which instigated new ways of perceiving and knowing, but also provoked a new crisis of seeing. From the mid-ninteenth century onwards, literary texts reflected multiple strategies of making visible the invisible. Representational techniques of realist and naturalist novels negotiated new scientific technologies such as the microscope, stethoscope, and x-rays, which enabled physicians optically and/or acoustically to penetrate the body’s interior, reinforcing the diagnostic importance of processes below the threshold of sight. Late-Victorian chronophotography, spirit photography and automatic writing were in dialogue with techniques of representing – or producing – the invisible in Victorian horror, detective, and sensation novels. Situating the Victorian obsession with tales of death, resuscitation, and revenants from the ‘other side’ in its literary-historical context, we will also consider fin-de-siècle spiritualism, Victorian physio-psychology, and Freud’s concept of the “uncanny”. The seminar will close by briefly investigating further dimensions of inaccessibility and their literary mediations: the invisibility and inaudibility of (past) oral speech, the paradoxical late-Victorian ‘cult of presence’, and transformations of the voice via phonography, telegraphy, phonograph and telephone.
We will look at excerpts (provided via GRIPS) from poems by Edgar Allan Poe, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Emily Brontë, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling; Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843); Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847); Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847); Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1852-53); Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860); Thomas Carlyle, “On History” (1830); George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871-72); Anthony Trollope, “The Telegraph Girl” (1877); Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Voice of Science” (1891); Henry James, “In the Cage” (1898).
We will read the following full texts – please get a copy: Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), “The Purloined Letter” (1845), in: Edgar Allan Poe: Tales of Mystery and Imagination, ed. Graham Clarke (London: Everyman, 1993); George Eliot, The Lifted Veil (1859), ed. Sally Shuttleworth (London: Penguin, 2001); Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), ed. Robert Mighall (London: Penguin, 2002); Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897), ed. Maurice Hindle (London: Penguin, 2003); H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man (1897), ed. Patrick Parrinder (London: Penguin, 2005).
For preparation I recommend: Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000; Jonathan Crary. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Boston: MIT Press, 1992; John M. Picker, Victorian Soundscapes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003; Susanne Scholz und Julika Griem, Hrsg. Medialisierungen des Unsichtbaren um 1900. München: Wilhelm Fink, 2010.
Requirements: active participation, written responses to study questions, and a term paper (c. 15-20 pages; deadline: Friday, 12 March 2021).