Module ENGL2671: Science and the Literary Imagination, 1850-1900

Department: English Studies

ENGL2671: Science and the Literary Imagination, 1850-1900

Prerequisites

• Any Single or Joint Honours finalist student wishing to take this Special Topic module must have satisfactorily completed the required number of core modules. Combined Honours and Outside Honours students must have satisfactorily completed either two Level 1 core introductory modules in English, or at least one Level 1 core module and one further lecture based module in English at Level 2

Corequisites

• None.

Excluded Combination of Modules

• None.

Aims

• To explore a range of Victorian literary responses to scientific modernity, through poetry, fiction and the short story.
• To introduce students to scientific writing from the nineteenth century, covering a range of concepts such as evolution, physicalism and mesmerism, which will inform their critical appreciation of imaginative literature.
• To examine how literary culture in the nineteenth century influenced debates about the legitimacy, authority and limits of scientific understanding, and the extent to which these two forms of writing expressed a shared public discourse.
• To introduce students to debates in the emerging critical field of literature and science, which includes questions of a historiographical and theoretical nature.

Content

• Focuses on literature of the second half of the nineteenth century and its intellectual and imaginative engagement with developments in scientific modernity.
• Addresses major writers of the period, such as Tennyson, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy and Butler, and some less familiar works by Wilkie Collins and Richard Marsh.
• Examines a range of literary genres (novels, short fiction, poetry) and encourages close textual analysis of nineteenth-century scientific writing, including Darwin’s autobiography.
• Surveys the interactions between literature and science in relation to topics such as evolution, mind/body, epistemology, medicine, vivisection, telegraphy, telepathy and spiritualism.
• Combines close reading of individual texts with a wider investigation of intellectual culture in scientific modernity (the death of god, humanism and anti-humanism, scepticism, ethics).

Learning Outcomes

• Students will gain extensive knowledge and understanding of literary responses to scientific culture in the Victorian period.
• Students will be able to demonstrate knowledge of the relationship between literary texts and scientific ideas.

• Students studying this module will develop:
• critical skills in the close reading and analysis of texts
• an ability to demonstrate knowledge of a range of texts and critical approaches
• informed awareness of formal and aesthetic dimensions of literature and ability to offer cogent analysis of their workings in specific texts
• sensitivity to generic conventions and to the shaping effects on communication of historical circumstances, and to the affective power of language
• an ability to articulate and substantiate an imaginative response to literature
• an ability to articulate knowledge and understanding of concepts and theories relating to literary studies
• command of a broad range of vocabulary and an appropriate critical terminology
• awareness of literature as a medium through which values are affirmed and debated

• Students studying this module will develop:
• a capacity to analyse critically
• an ability to acquire complex information of diverse kinds in a structured and systematic way involving the use of distinctive interpretative skills derived from the subject
• skills of effective communication and argument
• competence in the planning and execution of essays
• awareness of conventions of scholarly presentation, and bibliographic skills including accurate citation of sources and consistent use of scholarly conventions of presentation
• a capacity for independent thought and judgement, and ability to assess the critical ideas of others
• skills in critical reasoning
• an ability to handle information and argument in a critical manner
• information-technology skills such as word-processing and electronic data access information
• organisation and time-management skills

Modes of Teaching, Learning and Assessment and how these contribute to the learning outcomes of the module

• Seminars: encourage peer-group discussion, enable students to develop critical skills in the close reading and analysis of texts, and skills of effective communication and presentation; promote awareness of diversity of interpretation and methodology.
• Consultation session: encourages students to reflect critically and independently on their work.
• Independent but directed reading in preparation for seminars provides opportunity for students to enrich subject-specific knowledge and enhances their ability to develop appropriate subject-specific skills.
• Typically, directed learning may include assigning student(s) an issue, theme or topic that can be independently or collectively explored within a framework and/or with additional materials provided by the tutor. This may function as preparatory work for presenting their ideas or findings (sometimes electronically) to their peers and tutor in the context of a seminar; informal position papers encourage students to advance claims and refine them in the light of seminar discussion
• Coursework: tests the student's ability to argue, respond and interpret, and to demonstrate subject-specific knowledge and skills such as appreciation of the power of imagination in literary creation and the close reading and analysis of texts; they also test the ability to present word-processed work, observing scholarly conventions.
• Feedback: The written feedback that is provided after the first assessed essay allows students to reflect on examiners' comments, giving students the opportunity to improve their work for the second essay.

Teaching Methods and Learning Hours

Summative Assessment

Formative Assessment:

Before the first essay, students will have an individual consultation session in which they are entitled to show their seminar leader a list of points relevant to the essay and receive oral comment on these points. Students may also, if they wish, discuss their ideas for the second essay at this meeting.

■ Attendance at all activities marked with this symbol will be monitored. Students who fail to attend these activities, or to complete the summative or formative assessment specified above, will be subject to the procedures defined in the University's General Regulation V, and may be required to leave the University