Syllabus
Course: Victorian Visual Technologies and
Text: Optical Culture, Spectacle, and the Literary
Text
Instructor: Isobel Armstrong is a professor of
English emerita at Birkbeck College, University of London,
and one of this year's visiting John Hinkley Professors at
the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. Armstrong
specializes in Romantic and Victorian literature, feminist
criticism, and literary theory.
Course description: In the 19th century, glass-one
of the oldest artificial materials in the world-became mass
produced. That transformed ways of seeing and formed a new
optical consciousness as the proliferation of innumerable
combinations of the lens, the mirror, and the glass
panel-such as the kaleidoscope, the magic lantern, and the
stereoscope-changed the environment. Literal references to
glass and the iconographies it created abound in fiction
and poetry. This course aims to examine the immanent
presence of optical culture in literary texts and the
cultural meanings of the science of spectacle as explicated
in popular print journalism.
Readings:
Middlemarch, George Eliot (1872)
Alice Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll
(1871)
Poems:
"The City of Dreadful Night," James Thomson (1874)
"The Lady of Shalott," Alfred Tennyson (1832)
"Meeting at Night" and "Parting at Morning," Robert
Browning (1845)
"Mirrors of Life and Death," Christina Rossetti (1881)
"The Moon Looks In," Thomas Hardy (1914)