Zwierlein, Anne-Julia

Victorian culture was a
culture of orality. Despite the rise of mass print, oral storytelling,
political speeches, sermons, lectures, public trials, and the reading aloud of
poetry, novels, and newspapers contributed to a thriving oral culture which in
terms of its huge audiences can well be termed a mass culture in its own right.
This seminar will engage with print-orality feedback loops in literary
writings; it will examine some of the settings and social contexts of popular
Victorian oral performances, examining how they, in turn, resurfaced in print.
There has been a number of cultural histories offering analyses of acoustics
and ‘soundscapes’ of the past (see John Picker’s Victorian Soundscapes,
2003), and we, too, will attend to phenomena of sound, including Gothic sound,
unlocatable sound and its troubling effects. The main part of the seminar will
then be concerned more specifically with the sound of voices, given that any
investigation of historical orality has to be concerned with vocal sound as the
“social-material dimension of human language” (Bernstein 2011). From early
Victorian horror stories (Edgar Allan Poe) we will proceed to sound and voices
in poetry (Browning and Tennyson), to staged reading voices in mid-Victorian
journalism and novels (Mayhew, Dickens), to questions of political
speech-making, especially by women orators (James, Du Maurier, Sharp, Robins).
Finally, we will discuss the topic of new technology for the ‘transportation’
and recording of voices – the phonograph and the telephone – as it was deployed
in fictional and non-fictional texts (Conan Doyle, Stoker). We will also listen
to some famous Victorian poets’ voices, e.g. Tennyson’s and Browning’s, recorded
via phonograph at the very end of the nineteenth century.

“Modern theories of pastoral have a way of turning
into theories of literature.” (Louis Montrose) ‘Pastoral’ texts, popular between
the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, have never entirely disappeared. They
offer a great deal more than idyllic countrysides populated with love-sick
shepherds: they imagine symbolical rites of passage probing the stability of
social and cultural identities, and they are highly self-reflexive, examining
the production and possibilities of fiction. Starting out from the Greek and
Latin roots of the tradition (Theocritus and Virgil, in English translation),
this lecture course combines an interest in pastoral politics and poetics with
early modern literary reflections on urbanization, the early-capitalist
metropolis and the town-country dichotomy that drives the pastoral hypothesis.
We will juxtapose poems and epics by Christopher Marlowe, Walter Raleigh, Ben
Jonson, John Donne, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, Andrew Marvell, and John
Milton with selected plays by William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, as well as
early modern novels by Philip Sidney and Mary Wroth. Time allowing, we will end
by discussing the abiding importance of the pastoral myth for constructions of
Englishness (the English countryside, heritage culture).

This seminar addresses students of the MA British Studies programme
preparing or completing their final theses but is also open to those writing
theses for a 'Staatsexamen' degree. Students will have the opportunity to
present their work-in-progress and receive feedback from faculty and fellow
students. Feedback will include theoretical approaches, writing techniques and
the most important writing stages, such as finding and defining your topic,
researching the material, structuring and presenting your arguments. Doctoral
candidates and advanced researchers will be invited to present their ongoing
projects and share their experiences.

PLEASE NOTE: two conferences are an
integral part of the seminar programme: the Regensburg-Passau Colloquium in
British Literature and Culture (11-12 May 2023), and the International
Conference ‘Transforming Victorian Orality’ (14-15 July 2023). More information
in class.

Requirements: BLK-M31: active participation, transcript of
one of the sessions / lectures (deadline: Monday, 11 September 2023); BLK-M35: active
participation, oral presentation of work-in-progress (‘conference style’).