Travelling Genres module handbook

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Travelling Genres

M O D U L E

H A N D B O O K

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ELS1303, Travelling Genres: Dates and syllabus, 201 0-2011

Term 1 Date Topic Page

1 11th Oct. Introduction: approaches to genre 10

2 18th Archetypal western: Stagecoach, dir John Ford (1939) 12

3 25th Quest Epic and the Western: The Searchers, dir. John Ford (1956) 14

4 1st Nov. Introduction to travel writing: Mary Kingsley and Bruce Chatwin 18

5 8th Travel writing and Empire: Sir Richard Burton 21

6 15th Reading week

19th Nov: DEADLINE FOR 1ST ASSESSMENT (BIBLIOGRAPHICAL EXERCISE)

7 22nd Tragedy and the Western: High Noon, dir. Fred Zinnemann (1952) 24

8 29th Travel writing and America: Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957) (i) 27

9 6th Dec. Western and elegiac pastoral: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, dir., George Roy Hill (1969)

30

10 13th Exercises for the 2nd assessment 32

Term 2 VACATION

11 10th Jan. Assessment / tutorials [no lecture or seminars this week]

10th Jan: DEADLINE FOR 2ND ASSESSMENT (COMMENTARY)

12 17th Travel writing and America: Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957) (ii) 27

13 24th Comedy and the Western: The General (Bruckman, Keaton, 1927) 33

14 31st Travel writing and autobiography: Olaudah Equiano 37

15 7th Feb. Travel writing and the elusive self: Mary Wollstonecraft 39

16 14th Emma and the development of the novel 42

17 21st Emma as costume drama: Emma, dir. Douglas McGrath (1996) 44

18 28th Reading week

19 7th March Emma as comedy 46

20 14th Travelling in England: William Cobbett’s Rural Rides (1830) and John Clare’s ‘Journey out of Essex’ (1841)

48

21 21st Emma as Bildungsroman 51

22 28th Teen Emma: Clueless, dir. Amy Heckerling (1995) 53

1st April: DEADLINE FOR 3RD ASSESSMENT (ESSAY 1)

23 4th April Travel writing: London 55

Term 3 VACATION

24 25th April Reinterpreting the Western: Dead Man, dir. Jim Jarmusch (1995) 57

11TH May: DEADLINE FOR 4TH ASSESSMENT (ESSAY 2)

Titles of films are picked out in bold: in these weeks there will be a film after the lecture. This schedule is provisional. If there are any changes to the timetable, I will let you know by an e-mail sent to you Middlesex e-address.


ELS1303 TRAVELLING GENRES 2010-2011 30 Credits Contents Page

Dates and syllabus 2

Tutor 4

Teaching arrangements & attendance 4

Tutorials and office hours 4

Keeping in touch 5

WebCT / OASIS 5

Aims and nature of the course 5

Learning outcomes 6

Assessment scheme 6

Submission of coursework 7

Return of coursework 7

Resubmission: a second chance 7

Libraries 8

Books and bookshops 8

Websites 9

Week by week guide to the course 10

Essay coversheet 61


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Tutor

James Brown Trent Park room B304 E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] Teaching arrangements & attendance We meet on Mondays at Trent Park. Provisionally the times and rooms are as follows: Times Event Room 09.30-12.30 Mondays Lecture / Screening M005 13.30-15.00 Mondays Seminar 1 M013

15.30-17.00 Mondays Seminar 2 L100A You should attend the lecture and one seminar each week. Lectures take place on Monday mornings. In the eight weeks when we’re also watching a film, they will be screened immediately after the lecture. When there isn’t a screening, the lecture will start at 11.00, rather than 09.30. Your goal each week should be to come ready to participate in discussion. That doesn’t necessarily mean having a worked out view of the author or topic, but it does mean having done some reading and some thinking. Always make time for thinking, and always keep a note of whatever thoughts occur to you as you read. It’s very easy to tell oneself that one has no thoughts — at least none worth communicating — and so one ends up censoring oneself. Your initial thoughts may not be very polished; but then nobody’s are. It’s much better to develop and test one’s own insights, than merely to reproduce other people’s. There’ll usually be some critical or theoretical material to read for each week, along with one or more literary texts, and some questions. Read these, and make some notes on the questions to bring to the seminar. Bear in mind, it’s fine to come to our meetings with questions and problems, but it’s not acceptable to come with nothing. If you’re bemused, and can’t make head or tail of something, don’t be disheartened, but drop me a line to ask for clarification. Tutorials & Office hours Everyone’s entitled to tutorial time. Schedules of tutorial times will be posted in due course. These will be tutorials in which we’ll discuss the planning of your work. Tutorials to discuss work after its return or any other matter may be arranged by request. Arrange a time when we meet or by e-mail. Keeping in touch Feel free to e-mail me with any questions or concerns ([email protected] or [email protected]). If you have to miss a session, I would appreciate it if you’d let me know. If you get into difficulties with your studies, please tell me as soon as possible: it’s easiest to solve problems if they’re caught early.


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I’ll normally send e-messages to your Middlesex e-account. Please check it regularly (i.e. at least twice a week). If that proves impossible, then I’m willing to use a different e-address for you. Tell me what it is in an e-mail to me at [email protected]. WebCT / OASIS Handouts, seminar questions, essay questions, and other course materials will be posted on OASIS. To get to OASIS follow the link at the top right of the 24/7 homepage, http://www.mdx.ac.uk/24-7/. In order get access to OASIS, you need to be registered for the module. Aims and nature of the course Genre is intrinsic to how we read and write, and to film-making and spectatorship. This module examines the ways three genres develop in different media: the Western, travel-writing, and the novel. We will consider the generic identities of several Westerns and of several instances of travel-writing and of Jane Austen’s Emma and various adaptations of it. You’ll develop skills in close textual analysis, comparative and contrastive analysis, classificatory skills, and skills in identifying and representing arguments and other rhetorical practices, oral and written. The module aims, therefore, to foster the skills, understanding and knowledge necessary to bring together diverse material so as to grasp the complex significance of genres in the development of interrelated themes, forms and meanings. The module’s three genres differ from each other, in their media as much as in their form, but share certain preoccupations. Journeys figure in all of them, and all are usually interested in sense of place, and may be concerned to explore individual development, to representation otherness, and to compare civilization and nature. Early in the module we’ll examine classical genres by measuring several westerns against them (e.g., in considering High Noon in relation to Aristotelian tragedy, or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in relation to pastoral elegy). Most of the module aims to explore the connexions and migrations across space, time and cultures of its three genres. The three strands of the module are therefore interwoven. We will be asking ourselves, for example, how the concerns of one form are expressed in another, and how we use genres, consciously or intuitively, to create meaning. Thus, for example, we will bear in mind the relation between the western and travel-writing. Our examination of Jane Austen’s Emma will be introduced by travel-writing written during her lifetime, and we will then examine the way in which the novel has migrated into film and TV. Our discussion of the novel itself will pick up questions of authentic civilization that we will have already broached in connexion with Stagecoach, and consider the novel’s use of excursion and travel.


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Learning Outcomes (i) knowledge You will develop knowledge of:

• various definitions of genre; • how genre shapes reading and writing practices; • the key narrative and thematic features of the genres studied; and • how genre is deployed in various types of cultural argument.

(ii) skills You will develop skills in:

• describing and evaluating research materials, including constructing a bibliography;

• critical and evaluative reading; • understanding the structures of narrative and argument; • oral and written presentation.

Assessment scheme The module is assessed by coursework, and has five components. (a) Assessment 1 – 10%

Annotated bibliography or research exercise. Deadline: by Friday, 19 November 2010 to the Student Office, Trent Park

(b) Assessment 2 – 20% Close analysis of a short excerpt (800 words) Deadline: by Monday, 10 January 2011 to the Student Office, Trent Park

(c) Assessment 3 – 35% First essay (1500 words) Deadline: by Friday, 1 April 2011 to the Student Office, Trent Park

(d) Assessment 4 – 35% Second essay (1500 words) Deadline: by Wednesday, 11 May 2011 to the Student Office, Trent Park NB you should answer on a topic other than the one you wrote about for assessment 3.

NB Before writing anything, please read the guidanc e about presentation and referencing in the English Literature Presentation Skills Booklet , which is available from the OASIS website of all ELS modules . Failure to adhere to proper scholarly conventions in the presentation of argument and evidence will produce poor results.


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Submission of coursework You should submit two copies of each piece of coursework. You should attach a completed coversheet to each copy. The coversheets for this module are at the back of this handbook, and may be copied or downloaded from WebCT / OASIS. Work should normally be handed in at Trent Park or Cat Hill. The advantage of bringing it yourself is that you will get a receipt which proves that the work was handed in on time. However, if coming in is inconvenient, you may post the work, provided it goes first class. It should be posted in time to be franked on or before the deadline date. The postal address is:

Coursework for ELS1303 (F.A.O. Dr James Brown), Student Office, Middlesex University, Trent Park, London N14 4YZ

If you post your work, it would be a good idea also to e-mail it to me, as proof that you completed the assessment on time. That will be useful if your essay gets lost in the post. Submission solely by e-mail is not normally allowed. Whether you post your work or bring it in, please always be sure to keep a copy of it. Occasionally essays go astray, and then I’ll have to ask you for another copy. If you keep copies of your work in electronic form, be sure to make back-ups onto a CD or a flash drive or whatever. The easiest way to make back-ups is with a programme such as SyncBack, which can be downloaded for free. Google ‘SyncBack’ and you’ll find it. Return of coursework Assessments 1 and 2 will be returned to you in class, though if you miss the session in which an assignment has been returned, you will usually be able to collect it from the Humanities office, room B312 in the Bevan building. Assessments 3 and 4, along with any earlier work still uncollected, will be left in room B312 for you to collect during office hours. I’ll notify you when the essays are ready for collection. Resubmission: a second chance Should you fail any the assessments for this module, other than those due by the final university deadline of 11th May 2011, you will have one chance to resubmit the work in order to improve your grade and show that you’ve achieved the module’s learning outcomes. The exact deadline for the resubmission of a particular piece of work will be specified on the feedback sheet you get back with the failed work but it will normally be four weeks after the original deadline. Please note that this right to reassessment does not apply if you fail part of the assessment by reason of non-submission. If you fail to hand in a piece of work on time, you will still need to do it to pass the course, but it will be liable to penalty for lateness.


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Libraries The libraries at Trent Park and Cat Hill will meet your basic needs for this module. However, you may need to look elsewhere for some items – either to other campuses, or to local libraries, or to other academic libraries. Ask the library staff about the ‘M25’ inter-library loan system. You should become familiar with the library’s electronic resources. See http://www.lr.mdx.ac.uk/lib/eresources/index.htm. Books and bookshops When we are studying a text, you’ll need your own copy. In most cases these will be supplied in the module reader. But you will need to buy two books. It would be helpful for us to use the same editions, so that we all have the same page numbers. This is what you need:

• Jane Austen, Emma, ed. Nicola Bradbury (Ware: Wordsworth, 2000) • Jack Kerouac, On the Road, intr. Ann Charters (Harmondsworth, Penguin,

1991) You might also consider acquiring the following handy guides to the main concepts and jargon on literary and film studies:

• Chris Baldick, ed. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxford: OUP, 1991)

• Susan Hayward, Key Concepts in Cinema Studies (London: Routledge, 1996) These books are available from any good bookshop (even if they don’t have it, they’ll order it for you) or from an internet bookseller (such as Amazon.co.uk, through which one can also buy secondhand books from a wide range of dealers). There are several branches of Waterstone’s near the campus:

• 26, Church St, Enfield, EN2 6BE, 020 8363 6060 • 2, The Spires Shopping Centre, High St, Barnet, EN5 5XY, 020 8449 8229 • 782, High Rd, Finchley, London, N12 9QR, 020 8446 9669

However, you might find it more convenient to pop down the Piccadilly line to one of the big bookshops in central London. These include Waterstones, Foyles, Blackwells and Borders:

• Blackwell's, 100 Charing Cross Rd, WC2H, 020-7292-5100 [http://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk]

• W.&G.Foyle, 119 Charing Cross Rd., WC2H 0EB, 020-7437-5660 [http://www.foyles.co.uk]

• Waterstone's, 82 Gower St., WC1E 6EQ, 020-7636-1577 [http://www.waterstones.com]

• Waterstone's, The Simpson's Building, Piccadilly, SW1Y 6WW, 020-7851-2400


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Websites There are many handy websites. Wikipedia is useful for lots of subjects: http://www.wikipedia.org/ — but do bear in mind none of this stuff has been checked in the way that all academic publications have been, so be wary. Film

• http://www.imdb.com is useful for reminding yourself who’s appeared in what film — it’s a pretty comprehensive database, with plot summaries, credits, etc, and easy to search.

• http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/sections/film.html is kindly provided by our colleagues up in Aberdeen, with links to other film sites.

• http://www.mrqe.com/ is the Movie Review Query Engine, for finding film reviews

Literature

• The literary encyclopedia includes articles on authors, themes and critical theory: http://www.litencyc.com/.

• This is large collection of links about poetry: http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/ellpatke/Research/poetry_links.htm

• Many links here about literature: http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Lit/ • If you get into mythology, Bullfinch’s collection of mythology is available online

on many sites, including http://www.bulfinch.org/ • http://gutenberg.net.au/voyagesandtravels.html a library of downloadable

travel books

In addition, http://www.intute.ac.uk/ is a guide to websites for many disciplines. See especially the English page (http://www.intute.ac.uk/english/) and the film page (http://www.intute.ac.uk/film/). If you find a site that’s especially useful, please let us all know.


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WEEK BY WEEK GUIDE TO THE COURSE Week 1 Introduction: approaches to genre This week we’ll think about several different understandings of genre, and about the different ways in which genre is used by writers, by readers, by filmmakers and by spectators. There are different sets of criteria that can be invoked to classify works into genres (for example, they may relate to matters of form, or to the setting of a fiction, or to the emotional response the work seems to seek); there are also different ways of conceiving how genre works and what it essentially means. For example, one think of genres statically (a bit like pigeonholes in a mail room: they don’t move about or merge, and every item has one pigeonhole that suits it best), or more fluidly and dynamically. We’ll think about the significance and merits of these and other approaches, and do some exercises to help us become aware of the ways we use concepts of genre, knowingly or not. FURTHER READING Beebee, Thomas O. The ideology of genre: a comparative study of generic instability (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994) Buscombe,Edward. ‘The Idea of Genre in the American Cinema’, Screen, 11 / 2 (1970): 33-45. Colie, Rosalie L. The resources of kind: genre-theory in the Renaissance, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Berkeley; London: University of California Press, 1973) Dubrow, Heather. Genre (London: Methuen, 1982) Duff, David. ed. Modern genre theory (London: Longman, 2000) Fowler, Alastair. Kinds of literature: an introduction to the theory of genres and modes (1982; Oxford: Clarendon, 1985) Freedman, Aviva and Peter Medway, eds. Genre and the new rhetoric (London: Taylor & Francis, 1994) Frow, John. Genre (London: Routledge, 2005) Frye, Northrop. An Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: PUP, 1957) Gerhart, Mary. Genre choices, gender questions (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992) Grant, Barry Keith. ed. Film Genre Reader, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986) ----, Film Genre Reader, vol. 2. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995)


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Grant, Barry Keith. Film Genre: From Iconography to Ideology (London: Wallflower, 2006) Hernadi, Paul. Beyond genre: new directions in literary classification (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972) Lacey, Nick. Narrative and genre: key concepts in media studies (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000) Neale, Steve. Genre and Hollywood (London: Routledge, 2000) Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking and the Studio System (New York: McGraw Hill, 1981) Snyder, John. Prospects of power: tragedy, satire, the essay, and the theory of genre (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991) Todorov, Tzvetan. The fantastic: a structural approach to a literary genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973) Wellek, René and Austin Warren. Theory of literature, 3rd edn. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963)


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Week 2 Archetypal western: Stagecoach We’re starting this week with a movie that, so far as the post-war western is concerned, at any rate, set the pattern. John Ford’s Stagecoach marked his return to the western after the 1930s which had been a thin decade for A-feature westerns. It also marked (even if it didn’t all by itself cause) a revival in the genre’s fortunes. The westerns we’re looking at in the rest of the course are, in one way or another, westerns that can be thought of as being related to other genres. In a sense that’s even true with this film. But we’re going to start our investigation of the western and genre by exploring Stagecoach in order to establish for ourselves some provisional sense of what might be distinctive about the western: in terms of setting (that seems obvious, but isn’t necessarily, as can be seen from Yojimbo, which could be a kind of western, and which is set in Japan, and several other ‘westerns’, such as Westworld (Crighton, 1973), set in an android theme park, or Outland (Hyams, 1981), which is High Noon in space, or The Proposition (Hillcoat, 2005), which is set in Australia, or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Huston, 1948), which is set in Mexico. SET FILM Stagecoach, dir. John Ford (USA: Walter Wanger Productions, 1939) SET READING Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking and the Studio System (New York: McGraw Hill, 1981), pp. 45-63. FURTHER VIEWING The following films also have some claim to be archetypal westerns:

• High Noon, dir. Fred Zinnemann (USA: Stanley Kramer Pictures / UA, 1952) • The Magnificent Seven, dir. John Sturges (USA: Mirisch Corp./ UA, 1960) • My Darling Clementine, dir. John Ford (USA: Twentieth Century-Fox, 1946) • Rio Bravo, dir. Howard Hawks (USA: Armada Productions, 1959) • Shane, dir. George Stevens (USA: Paramount Pictures, 1953)

FURTHER READING Anobile, Richard J., ed. John Ford’s Stagecoach (New York: Darien House, 1974) Bazin, André. What is Cinema? 2 Vols., trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967, 1971) Buscombe, Edward. The BFI Companion to the Western (London: BFI, 1988) ----, Stagecoach, BFI Film Classics (London: BFI, 1992) Cameron, Ian. ed. The Movie Book of the Western (London: Studio Vista, 1996)


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Cook, Pam. ed. The Cinema Book (London: BFI, 1985) Fenin, George and William K. Everson. The Western: from Silents to Cinerama (New York: Orion, 1962) French, Philip. Westerns: aspects of a movie genre; and, Westerns revisited, rev. edn. (Manchester: Carcanet, 2005) Grant, Barry Keith. ed. John Ford’s Stagecoach (Cambridge: CUP, 2003) Kitses, Jim. Horizons west: directing the Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood, rev. edn. (London: BFI, 2004) Ray, Robert B. A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980 (Princeton: PUP, 1985), ch. 2. Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking and the Studio System (New York: McGraw Hill, 1981), ch. 3. Simmon, Scott. The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre’s First Half-Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) Warshow, Robert. ‘The Westerner’ (1954) rptd. in The Immediate Experience, rev. edn. (Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 2001). Wills, Garry. John Wayne: The Politics of Celebrity (London: Faber and Faber, 1997) Wright, Will. Sixguns and Society: a structural study of the Western (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975)


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Week 3 Quest epic and the Western: The Searchers Westerns are often said to be ‘epic’, and the term usually implies something about the scale and scope of the story, the majesty of the settings, and the number of stars in the picture. But there’s a more precise sense in which some westerns might be said to be ‘epic’. Epic (a.k.a. Heroic) poetry is almost the most ancient poetic genre. It goes back in the western tradition to the Roman poet Virgil and then, many centuries before him, to the Greek epics of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and then possibly back several centuries to the epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient Babylonian poem. Epics concern the great: Gilgamesh is a king, the Iliad is all about the Trojan War, and thus King Agamemnon of the Greeks, and King Priam of the Trojans, and several great warriors on each side, most famously Achilles and Hector. Virgil’s the Aeneid tells of the wandering of a Trojan prince, Aeneas, until he founds Rome. So epic poems are typically about great heroes and kings, and the fate of peoples. Sometimes, as in the Iliad, they have tragic overtones; sometimes the emphasis falls more on overcoming huge obstacles to create a new polity (as in the Aeneid). The Odyssey is slightly different: it starts after the fall of Troy, and concerns the struggles the Greek hero Odysseus has in getting home to Ithaca after the end of the siege. He’s going home by sea, so it’s bad luck that Poseidon, the sea god, is his enemy. By comparison with the Iliad, which deals with only a few days in the tenth and final year of the siege of Troy, the Odyssey is expansive and episodic: Odysseus goes from one adventure to another. It’s held together, though, by his overall quest for home. The two poems have often been seen as mapping out most of the basic possibilities for subsequent literature. We’ll apply concepts of quest epic to The Searchers to see how far Ford’s 1956 western can be seen as exemplifying any of the genre’s traits or concerns. SET FILM The Searchers, dir. John Ford (USA: C.V. Whitney Pictures, 1956) SET READING

• From Booker, Christopher. The Seven Basic Plots (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 70-86.

• For an account of The Odyssey, see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey. FURTHER VIEWING Some other epic westerns:

• The Covered Wagon, dir. James Cruze (USA: Famous Players-Lasky, 1923) • How the West Was Won, dir. Henry Hathaway, John Ford and George

Marshall (USA: MGM, 1962) • The Iron Horse, dir. John Ford (USA: Fox Film Corp., 1924) • Once Upon a Time in the West, dir. Sergio Leone (Italy / USA: Finanzia San

Marco, 1969) • Dances with Wolves, dir. Kevin Costner (USA: Tig Productions, 1990)


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• Gone with the Wind, dir. Victor Fleming, et al. (USA: Selznick International Pictures, 1939) [unless you reckon this is more a ‘Southern’ than a Western]

FURTHER READING On epic Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968) Cary, John. Spectacular!: the story of epic films, ed. John Kobal (London: Hamlyn, 1974) Conrad, Peter. Cassell’s history of English literature (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006), ch. 1 Elley, Derek. The epic film: myth and history (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984) Ker, W. P. Epic and romance: essays on medieval literature (1908; New York: Dover, 1957) Jackson, W.T.H. The hero and the king: an epic theme (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.) Lukács, Georg. The theory of the novel: a historico-philosophical essay on the forms of great epic literature, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Merlin Press, 1971) Merchant, Paul. The Epic (London: Methuen, 1971) Miller, Dean A. The epic hero (Baltimore, Md; Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000) Quint, David. Epic and empire: politics and generic form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1993) On The Searchers Anderson, Lindsay. About John Ford (London: Plexus, 1981) Bogdanovich, Peter. John Ford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968) Buscombe, Edward. The Searchers (London: British Film Institute, 2000) Clauss, James J. ‘Descent Into Hell’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 27:3 (Fall, 1999): 3. Cole, David L. ‘Mose Harper: eccentricity and survival in The Searchers’, Literature-Film Quarterly 28:3 (July, 2000).


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Courtney, Susan. ‘Looking for (Race and Gender) Trouble in Monument Valley’, Qui Parle: Literature, Philosophy, Visual Arts, History 6:2 (Spring-Summer 1993): 97-130. Eckman-Jadow, Judith. ‘Love the Western Way: Shane, The Searchers, Unforgiven’ Issues in Psychoanalytic Psychology, 25:2 (FalL 2003): 67-80

Eckstein,Arthur M. ‘After the Rescue: The Searchers, the Audience and Prime Cut’, Journal of Popular Culture, 28:3 (Winter 1994): 33-53.

Eckstein, Arthur M. ‘Darkening Ethan: John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) from Novel to Screenplay to Screen’, Cinema Journal, 38:1 (1998): 3-24. Eckstein, Arthur M. and Peter Lehman, eds. The Searchers: essays and reflections on John Ford’s classic western (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004), esp. Martin Winkler ‘Homer’s Iliad and John Ford’s The Searchers’ Freedman, Jonathan. ‘The affect of the market: economic and racial exchange in The Searchers’, American Literary History, 12:3 (Fall, 2000): 585-600. [and see also: Baughman, James L. ‘“That’ll be the day”: response to Freedman’, American Literary History, 12:3 (Fall, 2000): 605-10.] Gallagher, Tag. John Ford: The Man and His Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) Henderson, Brian. ‘The Searchers: An American Dilemma’, Film Quarterly, 34:2 (Winter 1980/1981): 9-23 Peter Lehman, ‘Looking at Look’s Missing Reverse Shot: Psychoanalysis and Style in John Ford’s The Searchers’, Wide Angle 4:4, 81: 65-69. Lehman, Peter. ‘Texas 1868 / America 1956: The Searchers’ in Lehman, ed. Close Viewings: An Anthology of New Film Criticism (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1990), pp. 387-415. McBride, Joseph and Michael Wilmington. John Ford (London: Secker and Warburg, 1974) McBride, Joseph. Searching for John Ford; a life (2001; London: Faber & Faber, 2003) Miller,Pat, ‘The race to settle America: nice guys do finish last’, Literature-Film Quarterly, 29 (2001): 315-21. Movshovitz, Howard. ‘The Still Point: Women in the Westerns of John Ford;, Frontiers, 7 (1984): 68-72. Place, J.A. The Western Films of John Ford (Secaucus: Citadel Press, 1974)


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Peek, Wendy Chapman. ‘Cherchez la Femme: The Searchers, Vertigo, and Masculinity in Post-Kinsey America’, Journal of American Culture, 21:2 (1998): 73-87. Pye,Douglas. ‘Double Vision: Miscegenation and Point of View in The Searchers’ in The Book of Westerns, ed. Ian Cameron and Douglas Pye (New York: Continuum, 1996), pp. 229-35.. Roth, Marty. ‘“Yes My Darling Daughter”: Gender, Miscegenation, and Generation in John Ford’s The Searchers’, New Orleans Review, 18:4 (Winter 1991): 65-73.

Sarris, Andrew. The John Ford Movie Mystery (London: Secker and Warburg / BFI, 1976) ‘The Searchers’ (review) Film Quarterly, 34 (Winter 1980-81): 9-23 ‘The Searchers’ (review) Sight and Sound, 40 (Fall 1971): 210-14 Skerry, Philip J. ‘What Makes a Man to Wander? Ethan Edwards of John Ford’s The Searchers’, New Orleans Review, 18:4 (Winter 1991): 86-91.

Thomson, David. ‘Open and Shut: A Fresh Look at The Searchers,’ Film Comment, 33:4 (July-August, 1997): 28-32. Winkler, Martin M. ‘Tragic features in John Ford’s The Searchers’, Bucknell Review, 35:1 (1991): 185-208. rptd. in Martin M. Winkler, ed. Classical Myth and Culture in the Cinema (Oxford: OUP, 2001) Winkler, Martin M. ‘Homer’s Iliad and John Ford’s The Searchers’ in Arthur M. Eckstein and Peter Lehman, eds. ‘The Searchers’: Essays and Reflections on John Ford's Classic Western (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2004)


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Week 4 Introduction to travel writing: Mary Kingsley and B ruce Chatwin The criteria for travel writing as a genre look quite simple. There are no elaborate formal requirements such as those for sonnets or terza rima or neoclassical tragedy: it is simply a piece of writing about a journey. The only thing one might be tempted to add is that the journey should actually have taken place, otherwise all picaresque literature would count as travel writing. That seemingly straightforward definition (coincidentally, one that is used by The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing) leads one straight into difficulties, largely about ‘reality’. How can one know a journey has really happened? Is one insisting that travel writing should comprise only what is verifiably true? That might make for dull, fact-laden stuff. Lots of travel writing takes in speculation, rumour, self-reflection and fantasy along the way. The book that is now regarded as the first English novel, Robinson Crusoe, was initially offered to the public as a real travel tale. Indeed, it does have some basis in fact. For that matter, so too does Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, and Jerome K. Jerome’s comic novel, Three Men in a Boat. Should these count as travel-writing? If one thinks they shouldn’t (and that would probably be the conventional wisdom), then one’s left not merely asserting that travel writing should be true, but that it should be true to a certain minimum degree. The snag is that certain kinds of made up elements figure in works that most people would accept as travel-writing. So where does one draw the line between picaresque fiction and travel writing? We’re starting to explore travel writing by looking at a couple of examples: Mary Kingsley’s account of her travels in Africa, published in 1897, and Bruce Chatwin’s account of his journey to and around Patagonia (the south of South America, a region that includes parts of Argentina and Chile) appeared eighty years later in 1977. There are real journeys lurking somewhere behind both narratives, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we get the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. We might consider what sort of air of truthfulness each writer exudes, and then investigate to see how well founded an appearance of truthfulness might be. SET READINGS

• Kinglsey, Mary. Travels in West Africa (1897), ch. 5. • Chatwin, Bruce. In Patagonia (1977), pp. 42-51. • Korte, Barbara. English Travel Writing: from Pilgrimages to Postcolonial

Explorations, trans. Catherine Matthias (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), ch. 1. FURTHER READING On travel writing as a genre Borm, Jan. ‘Defining Travel: On the Travel Book, Travel Writing and Terminology’, in Glenn Hooper and Tim Youngs, eds. Perspectives on Travel Writing (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004)


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Korte, Barbara. English Travel Writing: from Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations, trans. Catherine Matthias (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000) Hulme Peter and Tim Youngs, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: CUP, 2002) Todorov, Tzvetan. ‘The Journey and its Narratives’, in Chloe Chard and Helen Langdon, eds. Transports: Travel, Pleasure and Imaginative Geography, 1600-1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996) Mary Kingsley Alexander, Caroline. One dry season: in the footsteps of Mary Kingsley (London: Bloomsbury, 1989) Birkett, Dea. Mary Kingsley: imperial adventuress (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992) Frank, Katherine. A voyager out: the life of Mary Kingsley (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987) Mills, Sara. Discourses of difference: an analysis of women's travel writing and colonialism (London: Routledge, 1991) Myer, Valerie Grosvenor. Victorian lady in Africa: the story of Mary Kingsley (Southampton: Ashford Press, 1989) Stevenson, Catherine Barnes. Victorian women travel writers in Africa (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982) Wallace, Kathleen. This is your home: a portrait of Mary Kingsley (London: Heinemann, 1956) Bruce Chatwin (a) Other works by Bruce Chatwin Chatwin, Bruce. Anatomy of restlessness: uncollected writings, ed. Jan Borm and Matthew Graves (London: Cape, 1996) Chatwin, Bruce. On the black hill (London: Cape, 1982) Chatwin, Bruce and Paul Theroux. Patagonia revisited, illus. Kyffin Williams (Wilton: Michael Russell, 1985) Chatwin, Bruce. Photographs and notebooks, ed. David King and Francis Wyndham (London: Cape, 1993)


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Chatwin, Bruce. The songlines (London: Cape, 1987) Chatwin, Bruce. Utz (London: Cape, 1988) Chatwin, Bruce. The Viceroy of Ouidah (London: Cape, 1980) Chatwin, Bruce. What am I doing here (London: Cape, 1989) (b) About Bruce Chatwin Clapp, Susannah. With Chatwin: portrait of a writer (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997) Horne, Alistair. ed. Telling lives: from W.B. Yeats to Bruce Chatwin (London: Macmillan, 2000) In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin, television, dir. Paul Yule (Little Bird / Berwick International, 1999, BBC, April 1999) Meanor, Patrick. Bruce Chatwin (New York: Twayne, 1997) Murray, Nicholas. Bruce Chatwin (Bridgend: Seren, 1993) Shakespeare, Nicholas. Bruce Chatwin (1999; London: Vintage, 2000) White, Edmund. Arts and letters (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2004)


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Week 5 Travel writing and Empire: Sir Richard Burton Sir Richard Burton was a controversial figure. He was not exactly a pillar of the British Empire. His hatred of most kinds of authority and a reputation for sexual vices disqualified him for that. But he is difficult to imagine him in any other context. As a student he got himself kicked out of Oxford, so we went to India in the service of the East India Company. He had a gift for languages, and started to learn various eastern ones. At heart he was an adventurer, and we’re looking at his concise retelling of the journey that made his name: he’s going on the Hajj to Mecca in disguise as an Indian Muslim. We are looking at Burton in relation to Edward Said’s critique of the way westerners have perceived and represented the east. The gist of Said’s case is that the west constructs the east dualistically as its own other. That means it is conceived as an object to be known by the west, rather than as a subject to be known by itself. It’s represented in a way that helps to make it seem ready to be taken possession of, while also being a kind of fantasy that represents the west’s wishes and projections rather than whatever it is that might be true (though Said is cagey about the question of truth and reality). What Said offers is at least in part an ethical critique of western representations of the east, and especially of Islam. Therefore in our consideration of Burton we will be asking ourselves about the ethics of travel writing and the peculiar problems of cross-cultural understanding. SET READINGS

• excerpt from Burton, Sir Richard. Wanderings in three continents, ed. W. H.Wilkins (New York: Dodd, Mead & co., 1901)

• Ashcroft, Bill and Pal Ahluwalia, Edward Said (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 54-67.

• Said, Edward. Orientalism, rev. edn. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), pp. 166-70, 192-7)

FURTHER READING Assad, Thomas. Three Victorian Travellers: Burton, Blunt, Doughty (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964) Brodie, Fawn M. The devil drives: a life of Sir Richard Burton (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1967) Burne, Glenn S. Richard F. Burton (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1985) Burton, Richard F. Love, war and fancy: the customs and manners of the East from writings on ‘The Arabian Nights’, ed. Kenneth Walker (London: Kimber, 1964) Burton, Richard F. Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah, 2 vols., 2nd edn. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans and Roberts, 1857) [available on http://books.google.co.uk/]


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http://burtoniana.org/ Casada, James A. Sir Richard F. Burton: a biobibliographical study (London: Mansell, 1990) Frantz, R. W. The English traveller and the movement of ideas, 1660-1732 (1934; New York: Octagon Books, 1968) Frawley, Maria H. A wider range: travel writing by women in Victorian England (London: Associated University Presses, 1994) Godsall, Jon R. ‘Fact and Fiction in Richard Burton’s Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah (1855-56)’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Series 3, 3:3 (1993): 331-351. Hourani, Albert Islam and the West (London: Macmillan, 1980) Jutzi, Alan H., ed.. In Search of Sir Richard Burton: Papers from a Huntington Library Symposium (Huntington Library, 1993) Kennedy, Dane Keith. The highly civilized man: Richard Burton and the Victorian world (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2005) Kiernan, Victor Gordon. Lords of Human Kind: European Attitudes to the Outside World in the Imperial Age (London: Weidenfeld, 1969) Lovell, Mary S. A rage to live: a biography of Richard and Isabel Burton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998) Macfie, A.L., ed. Orientalism, a reader (Edinburgh: EUP, 2000) McLynn, Frank. Burton: snow upon the desert (London: John Murray, 1990) McLynn, Frank. From the Sierras to the Pampas: Richard Burton’s travels in the Americas, 1860-69 (London: Century, 1991) Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992) Rice, Edward. Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: the secret agent who made the pilgrimage to Mecca, discovered the Kama Sutra, and brought the Arabian nights to the West (New York: Scribner’s, 1990) Swinglehurst, Edmund. The romantic journey: the story of Thomas Cook and Victorian travel (London: Pica Editions, 1974) Tidrick, Kathryn. Heart Beguiling Araby (Cambridge: CUP, 1981)


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Other travel writing on the Middle East: Blunt, Anne. A Pilgrimage to Nedj, the Cradle of the Arab Race. A Visit to the Court of the Emir and ‘Our Persian Campaign’ (London: Murray, 1879) Byron, Robert. The Road to Oxiana (1937), intr. Colin Thubron (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2007) Lawrence, T.E. Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 1997) Wortley Montague, Lady Mary. The Turkish Embassy Letters (1716-17) (1763; London: Virago, 1994) Raban, Jonathan. Arabia Through the Looking Glass (London: Picador, 1979) Thesiger, Wilfred. Arabian Sands (London: Longman, 1959) Other Victorian travel writing: Bird, Isabella. The Yangtze River and Beyond (1899) (London: Virago, 1985) Cunnighame Graham, R.B., Mogreb-el-Acksa (1898) (London: Century, 1988) Kingsley, Mary. Travels in West Africa (1897) (London: Dent, 1993) Stanley, H.M. Through the Dark Continent, 2 vols. (1878; New York: Dover, 1988) Week 6 READING WEEK


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Week 7 Tragedy and the Western: High Noon This is another in our series of approaches to a classical genre via a Western that has some relation to it. This time we’re thinking about tragedy. One of the commonest notions about tragedy is that it must end in death -- and not just any death, but the hero’s death. As you will see, in High Noon the hero lives to the end of the picture. Indeed, he heads off to a life elsewhere with his new wife on an open wagon, looking a bit like Dallas and Ringo in Stagecoach. The reason we’re looking at a Western in which the hero lives in order to investigate tragedy is not for want of westerns in which some or all of the heroes die in the final reel. If you’d like to see such a Western, you might look at The Magnificent Seven, or Sam Peckinpah’s Ride High Country and The Wild Bunch. But if one goes back to the archetypal tragedy, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, from the fifth century BC, one finds that the tragic hero does not die there either. Oedipus suffers horribly. He seeks to remove the cause of a blight that has descended on the city of Thebes, which he governs, and discovers that the source of the curse is himself. Oedipus blinds himself and goes into exile, sent away from the city where he has upheld the law. But he does not die. That is still not to say that High Noon is straightforwardly a classical tragedy. But in putting it alongside the model of tragedy that Aristotle derived from Oedipus the King in the fourth century BC, we’re aiming to attend particularly to questions of form (for example, to the unities of time, space and action), and then to certain shared concerns, such as the relation between the hero and the community, and the relation between the hero and different conceptions of law. In assessing the cultural distance between the world of Oedipus and today, we will also reflect on debates about the changing character of tragedy and whether tragedy proper is still possible for us at all. SET FILM

• High Noon, dir. Fred Zinnemann (USA: Stanley Kramer Pictures / UA, 1952) SET READINGS

• Excerpt from Carlson, Marvin. Theories of Theater (Ithaca: Cornell, 1984) • Excerpt from Leech, Clifford. Tragedy (London: Methuen, 1969)

FURTHER VIEWING Other possibly or partly tragic westerns:

• The Big Country, dir. William Wyler (USA: Anthony Productions, 1958) • Broken Lance, dir. Edward Dmytryk (USA: Twentieth Century - Fox, 1954) • Cheyenne Autumn, dir. John Ford (USA: Warner Bros., 1964) • Custer of the West, dir. Robert Siodmak (USA: Cinerama Productions, 1967) • The Gunfighter, dir. Henry King (USA: Twentieth Century - Fox, 1950) • Lonely Are the Brave, dir. David Miller (USA: Joel Productions, 1962)


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• The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, dir. John Ford (USA: Paramount Pictures, 1962)

• The Ox-Bow Incident, dir. William Wellman (USA: Twentieth Century - Fox, 1943)

• Pursued, dir. Raoul Walsh (USA: United States Pictures, 1947) • Ride the High Country, dir. Sam Peckinpah (USA: MGM, 1962) • Shane, dir. George Stevens (USA: Paramount, 1953) • The Shootist, dir. Don Siegel (USA: Dino di Laurentiis Company, 1976) • Unforgiven, dir. Clint Eastwood (USA: Malpaso Productions, 1992) • The Wild Bunch, dir. Sam Peckinpah (USA: Warner Bros. / Seven Arts, 1969)

FURTHER READING On tragedy: Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Malcolm Heath (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996) [and many other editions] Drakakis, John and Naomi Conn Liebler, eds. Tragedy (London: Longman, 1998) Draper, R.P., ed. Tragedy: developments in criticism: a casebook (London: Macmillan, 1980) Eagleton, Terry. Sweet violence: the idea of the tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003) Heilman, Robert B. Tragedy and melodrama: versions of experience (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968) Leech, Clifford. Tragedy (London: Methuen, 1969) Nuttall, A. D. Why does tragedy give pleasure? (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) Steiner, George. The Death of Tragedy (London: Faber, 1961) Williams, Raymond. Modern Tragedy (London: Chatto and Windus, 1966) On High Noon: Drummond, Philip. High Noon (London: BFI, 1997) Blake, Michael F. Code of honor: the making of three great American westerns-- High Noon, Shane, and The searchers (Lanham: Taylor Trade Pub., 2003) Byman, Jeremy. Showdown at high noon: witch-hunts, critics, and the end of the Western (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2004) Costello, Matthew. ‘Rewriting High Noon: Transformations in American Popular Political Culture During the Cold War’ Film & History 33:1 (2003): 30-40; also in


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Hollywood’s West: the American frontier in film, television, and history, ed. Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005) Foster, Gwendolyn. ‘The Women in High Noon (1952): A Metanarrative of Difference’, in The films of Fred Zinnemann: critical perspectives, ed. Arthur Nolletti, Jr (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999) Graham, Don. ‘The Women of High Noon: A Revisionist View’, Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, 34:4 (Fall 1980): 243-51. Kroeber, Karl. ‘Seeing and Imagining Ethical Crises: High Noon: Afternoon’, in Make believe in film and fiction: visual vs. verbal storytelling (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.) Lerner, Neil. ‘“Look at That Big Hand Move Along”: Clocks, Containment, and Music in High Noon’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 104:1 (Winter 2005): 151-73. McReynolds, Douglas J. and Barbara J. Lips, ‘Taking Care of Things: Evolution in the Treatment of a Western Theme, 1947-1957’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 18:3 (1990): 202-208. Palmer, R. Barton. ‘A Masculinist Reading of Two Western Films: High Noon & Rio Grande’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 12:4 (Winter, 1984): 156-162. Prince, Stephen. ‘Historical Perspective and the Realist Aesthetic in High Noon (1952)’ in The films of Fred Zinnemann: critical perspectives, ed. Arthur Nolletti, Jr (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999)

Rapf, Joanna E. ‘Myth, Ideology, and Feminism in High Noon’, Journal of Popular Culture, 23:4 (1990): 75-80. Sinyard, Neil. Fred Zinnemann: films of character and conscience (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2003) Weidhorn, Manfred. ‘High Noon: Liberal Classic? Conservative Screed?’ Bright Lights Film Journal, 47 (February 2005), http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/47/highnoon.htm


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Weeks 8 and 12 Travel writing and America: On the Road (1957) This is a course that approaches genre by an examination of three unusually fluid genres: travel-writing, the western and the novel. Jack Kerouac’s On The Road has a good claim to exemplify all three of these genres at once. It is usually spoken of as a novel, but it is an only thinly fictionalised account of real journeys that Kerouac took, often with his friend and (in a sense) his mentor, Neal Cassady. They appear in the book as Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty. Travelling in search of the true life and the perfect place has a special significance in American culture. But with the closure of the frontier in the 1890s, that promise of freedom for anyone with enough spirit to go out and take it was rescinded – and of course it had only been a promise for white America in the first place. On The Road is in some ways a search for that lost freedom – the freedom Ringo and Dallas may be heading for at the end of Stagecoach, and the freedom that Butch and Sundance feel they’re losing in dying days of the old west. As you’ll see, Kerouac and his friends literally run out of America: at one point they drive clear across the continent to the Pacific Coast where Dean declares “No more land!” Like Butch and Sundance, they turn south: the final journey takes them to Mexico. The exact kind of freedom they’re looking for is in some ways the product of their times: of a particular moment in the 1940s and 1950s, and a particular countercultural, avant garde movement, the Beats. We’ll explore the book as novel, as travel writing and as a kind of western, and think about how it constructs these things and its vision of America in relation to the values of the Beats. SET READING Kerouac, Jack. On the Road, intr. Ann Charters (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1991) For week 8 read the first two sections of On the Road (i.e. to p. 179), and for week 12 please read the remainder of the novel. FURTHER READING Other works by Jack Kerouac Kerouac, Jack. The Dharma Bums (1958; London: Grafton, 1972) Kerouac, Jack. Big Sur (1962; London: New English Library, 1963) [sequel to On the Road] Kerouac, Jack. Mexico City Blues (New York: Grove Press, 1959) [poetry] Kerouac, Jack. Lonesome Traveler (1960; London: Deutsch, 1962) [travel] Kerouac, Jack. Selected Letters, 1940-1956, ed. Ann Charters (New York: Viking, 1995)


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Kerouac, Jack. Selected Letters, 1957-1969, ed. Ann Charters (New York: Viking, 1999). Works about Kerouac and the Beats Cassady, Carolyn. Heart Beat: My Life with Jack and Neal (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Co., 1976) Charters, Ann. ed. The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America. (Detroit: Gale, 1983) Clark, Tom. Jack Kerouac (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984) Dittman, Michael J. Jack Kerouac: A Biography (Westport: Greenwood, 2004) Donaldson, Scott. ed. On the Road: Text and Criticism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979) French, Warren G. Jack Kerouac (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986) Giamo, Ben. Kerouac, the Word and the Way: Prose Artist as Spiritual Quester. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2000) Gifford, Barry & Lawrence Lee. Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978) Holton, Robert. On the Road: Kerouac’s Ragged American Journey (New York: Twayne, 1999) Hunt, Tim. Kerouac’s Crooked Road: The Development of a Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) Knight, Kit. Kerouac and the Beats: a primary sourcebook (New York: Paragon House, 1988) Nicosia, Gerald. Memory Babe: a critical biography of Jack Kerouac (1983; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) Swartz, Omar. The View from On the Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac. Carbondale: Southern Illinois U P, 1999. Theado, Matt. Jack Kerouac (Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2000) Turner, Steve. Jack Kerouac: Angelheaded Hipster (New York: Viking, 1996) Watson, Steven. The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters, 1944-1960 (New York: Pantheon, 1995) Weinreich, Regina. The Spontaneous Poetics of Jack Kerouac: A Study of the


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Fiction (Carbondale: Southern Illinois U P, 1987) Websites http://www.wordsareimportant.com/dharmabeat.htm a page of links http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap10/kerouac.html bibliography etc. Some other travel writing about America Bryson, Bill. The Lost Continent (London: Secker and Warburg, 1989) Burton, Richard. The city of the saints: and across the Rocky Mountains to California (New York: Harper, 1862) Dickens, Charles. American notes for general circulation, ed. Patricia Ingham (London: Penguin, 2000) Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America, trans. & ed. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) Tocqueville, Alexis de. Journey to America, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J.P.Meyer (New York: Doubleday, 1971) Lévy, Bernard-Henri. American vertigo: traveling America in the footsteps of Tocqueville (New York: Random House, 2006) Solnit, Rebecca. Savage Dreams: a journey into the landscape wars of the American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000)


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Week 9 Western and elegiac pastoral: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid Following our session on tragedy and High Noon, this week we are examining another genre with a possibly complex relation to the Western. Pastor is Latin for shepherd. Some clergy are known as pastors because the people whose spiritual well-being they look after are, metaphorically, their flock. That’s why ‘Pastoral’ in English has two quite different meanings: relating to rural life, and relating to spiritual or other care. But ‘pastoral’ has another meaning: a special kind of literature. Pastoral as a genre goes back more than two millennia, to pre-Christian times. It originally conjured up an ideal, perfect world of shepherds and nymphs who spend their days idyllically, while keeping an eye on the sheep. Theirs is a golden age of love, ease and music. Pastoral as a literary genre in this strict sense did not survive the eighteenth century. But, as you will see Gifford argues in the excerpt in the reader, pastoral survives in a looser sense: a literature about any perfect world of harmony in the bosom of nature, especially about that world and its loss. For in ways that we will explore from the seventeenth century onwards pastoral and elegy (a poem lamenting loss or death) have become interwoven. There are various reasons why this is so. One of them has to do with the way classical and Christian meanings of pastoral interacted: from a Christian point of view the only perfect pastoral world was the garden of Eden, the paradise in which God placed a new-made humanity – the paradise we lost. So pastoral readily acquires a feeling of loss. In looking at Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, we’re not expecting to find that the whole film simply is a pastoral, much less that it is a classical pastoral. But the Western does have a strong relation to kinds of art and writing that celebrate nature. One side of the Western, for example, owes a lot to American landscape painting of the nineteenth century, which testifies to a powerful sense of America as a uniquely blessed and majestic land, possibly a new Eden. And another side of the Western marks the passing of a finer age, usually in the way in which the land ceases to accommodate Native Americans and the heroic westerner. The coming of civilisation destroys the ways of life of both kinds of people, and is sometimes figured as another fall. So we will be asking ourselves whether, especially in the looser sense of pastoral, there might not be some persistent, if not permanent, way of apprehending life that we could label pastoral, and whether Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid does not share it. SET VIEWING Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, dir. George Roy Hill (USA: Campanile Productions, 1969) SET READING

• Pastoral poems: • Marlowe, Christoper. ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’ (1590s)


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• Marvell, Andrew. ‘Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Faun’ (1640s)

• Wordsworth, William. ‘The Solitary Reaper’ (5 November 1805) • Yeats, W.B. ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (1893)

• from Gifford, Terry. ‘Three Kinds of Pastoral’ in Pastoral (London: Routledge, 1999)

FURTHER VIEWING Other westerns with a pastoral element::

• Across the Wide Missouri, dir. William Wellman (USA: MGM, 1951) [pastoral lost]

• Bend of the River, dir. Anthony Mann (USA: Universal International, 1951) [pastoral sought]

• The Kentuckian, dir. Burt Lancaster (USA: Hecht-Lancaster Productions, 1955) [unless one sees this as being more about the ‘noble savage’ than about pastoral ideals]

• Oklahoma! , dir. Fred Zinnemann (USA: Magna Theater Corporation, 1955) • The Outlaw Josey Wales, dir. Clint Eastwood (USA: Malpaso Productions,

1976) [pastoral lost and regained] • River of No Return, dir. Otto Preminger (USA: Twentieth Century - Fox, 1954) • Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, dir. Stanley Donen (USA: MGM, 1954)

On Pastoral and American landscape: Empson, William. Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Chatto & Windus, 1935) Ettin, Andrew V. Literature and the Pastoral (New Haven: Yale UP, 1984) Gifford, Terry. Pastoral, New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 1999) Hughes, Robert. American Visions: the epic history of art in America (London: Harvill, 1997) Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: OUP, 1964) Scheese, Don. Nature writing: the pastoral impulse in America (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996) Toliver, Harold E. Pastoral forms and attitudes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971) Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973)


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On Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: Cawelti, John G. The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999) Chatwin, Bruce. In Patagonia (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977) [a book by a celebrated travel writer, including discussion of Butch and Sundance] Easthope, Antony. What a Man’s Gotta Do: the masculine myth in popular culture (London: Routledge, 1986), pp. 86-90. Goldman, William. Four screenplays with essays (New York: Applause Books, 1995) Horton, Andrew. The Films of George Roy Hill, rev. edn., foreword Paul Newman (Jefferson: McFarland & Co, 2005) Leonelli, Elisa. Robert Redford and the American West (????: Xlibiris, 2007), ch. 2. Turner, Graeme. Film as Social Practice (London: Routledge, 1988) Week 10 Exercises towards the 2 nd assessment. In this week we will use material we have already covered in order to practice the work involved in writing the second assignment. Week 11 Assessment / tutorials There will be no lecture or seminars this week. ELS assessment deadlines for many modules fall during this week. It has been left free of classes to enable you concentrate on writing assignments. Week 12 Travel writing and America: On the Road (1957), part 2 Please see p. 27.


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Week 13 Comedy and the western: The General (Bruckman & Keaton, 1927) Comedy runs through many westerns, even through some otherwise serious films. Stagecoach, for example, includes Doc Boone fleecing Peacock of his whisky samples, and The Searchers, one of the most sombre westerns ever made, features Captain the Rev. Samuel Johnson Clayton having buckshot removed from his backside, and the saintly simpleton Mose Harper. Certain kinds of comic scene are virtually an institution in the western, such as the saloon brawl. As we have seen, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is shot through with comedy, mostly of a kind where we’re laughing with the characters rather than at them, which also puts the film in the tradition of the comedy of wit. Its screenwriter, William Goldman, went on to write Maverick (1994), a more straightforwardly comic Western. There are many kinds of comedy, and one can find elements in westerns that exemplify most of them. The Searchers is almost Shakespearean in the way it mingles farce and serious drama. Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill and The Indians is arguably a satire on the western hero: an exposé of self-delusion and moral failure. Destry Rides Again (1939) manages to weave comedy into a story with a serious message about the futility of violence (much of the humour derives from the sheriff not believing in guns). But the commonest kind of comic western is arguably the spoof western. Parodies of the western include Cat Ballou (originally to have been made as a serious revenge western, but reinvented is a comedy in the making of it), Support Your Local Sheriff and its sequel Support Your Local Gunfighter, The Paleface, starring Jane Russell and Bob Hope, and (for the broadest comedy of all) Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles -- though oddly enough it’s one of the few westerns to give full weight to the otherwise grim topic of racism, at any rate before the movie explodes all over the studio backlot. However, arguably the finest comedy western had been made in the silent era by Buster Keaton in 1927. The General is set in the civil war, like some later westerns, such as The Horse Soldiers – unless one considers that a civil war setting (with its North-South, rather than East-West axis) disqualifies a film from being a western. In The General, though there is plenty to laugh at, there is not the same sense of everything being sent up that the spoof western tends to create. Keaton finds comedy in a situation whose overall seriousness is never denied. The General is also a reminder to us that the western had been a significant genre virtually from the beginning of the American film business. Our main concern in this session will be to think about the different kinds of comedy it offers, and especially about Keaton’s comic persona - one of the great creations of silent cinema. To do that we will also consider several theories of comedy including Bergson’s account of comedy and the mechanical, which is particularly pertinent given that the general of the film’s title is a steam engine. SET VIEWING The General, dir. Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman (USA: Buster Keaton Productions, 1926)


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SET READING From Nelson, T.G.A. ‘Comedy and Related Forms’ in Comedy: an introduction to comedy in literature, drama, and cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) FURTHER VIEWING Other comic Westerns:

• The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend, dir. Preston Sturges (USA: Twentieth Century - Fox, 1949)

• Blazing Saddles, dir. Mel Brooks (USA: Crossbow Productions, 1974) • Buffalo Bill and the Indians, dir. Robert Altman (USA: Dino de Laurentiis

Company, 1976) • Cat Ballou, dir. Elliot Silverstein (USA: Columbia Pictures, 1965) • City Slickers, dir. Ron Underwood (USA: Castle Rock, 1991) • Destry Rides Again, dir. George Marshall (USA: Universal Pictures, 1939) • Maverick, dir. Richard Donner (USA: Donner / Shuler-Donner Productions,

1994) • Paint Your Wagon, dir. Joshua Logan (USA: Malpaso Productions, 1969) • The Paleface, dir. Norman Z. McLeod (USA: Paramount Pictures, 1948) • Rustlers Rhapsody, dir. Hugh Wilson (USA: Paramount Pictures, 1985) • Way Out West, dir. James W. Horne (USA: Stan Laurel Productions, 1937)

[Laurel and Hardy] FURTHER READING On comedy: Atkinson, Rowan. Funny business. Visual comedy: a lecture by Rowan Atkinson, MSc. (Oxon.) [Videorecording] (BBC2, 1992) Bentley, Eric. The Life of the Drama (London: Methuen, 1965) Charney, Maurice. Comedy high and low: an introduction to the experience of comedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) Glasgow, R.D.V. Madness, masks, and laughter: an essay on comedy (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995) Horton, Andrew. ed. Comedy/cinema/theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) (esp. Noel Carroll, ‘Notes on the sight gag’, pp. 25-42. Jacobson, Howard. Seriously funny: an argument for comedy, 3 episodes [Videorecording] (Channel 4, 1997) Jacobson, Howard. Seriously funny: from the ridiculous to the sublime [A Channel Four book] (London: Viking, 1997) Levin, Harry. Playboys and killjoys: an essay on the theory and practice of comedy (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987)


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Merchant, W. Moelwyn. Comedy (London: Methuen, 1972) Nelson, T. G. A. Comedy: an introduction to comedy in literature, drama, and cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) Olson, Elder. The theory of comedy (Bloomington; London: Indiana U.P, 1968) Palmer, D.J. Comedy: developments in criticism: a casebook (London: Macmillan, 1984) Palmer, Jerry. The logic of the absurd: On film and television comedy (London: BFI Pub., 1987) Stott, Andrew. Comedy (London; New York: Routledge, 2005) Sypher, Wylie. ed. Comedy [George Meredith, Comedy: An essay on comedy; Henri Bergson, Laughter] (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980) Wagg,Stephen, ed. Because I tell a joke or two: comedy, politics, and social difference (London; New York: Routledge, 1998) On Buster Keaton: Buster Keaton: a hard act to follow [DVD] (Gill and Brownlow, 2006) Carroll, Noel. ‘Buster Keaton, The General, and Visible Intelligibility’, in Close Viewings: An Anthology of New Film Criticism, ed. Peter Lehman (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1990), pp: 125-40. Cott, Jeremy. ‘The limits of silent film comedy’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 3:2 (1975): 99-107. Dale, Alan S. Comedy is a man in trouble: slapstick in American movies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), ch. 3. Friedman, Arthur B. ‘Interviews: Buster Keaton’, Film Quarterly, 19:4 (1966:Summer): 2. The Great Stone Face [Videorecording], Channel Four, (Becker, 1986) Gunning, Tom. ‘Buster Keaton or the work of comedy in the age of mechanical reproduction’, Cineaste, 21:3 (Summer, 1995):14-16. Hogue, Peter. ‘Eye of the Storm: Buster Keaton’, Film Comment, 31:5 (Sept-Oct, 1995): 20-28 Keaton, Buster. My wonderful world of slapstick, (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960)


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Kirby, Lynne. ‘Temporality, Sexuality and Narrative in The General’, Wide Angle: A Film Quarterly of Theory, Criticism, and Practice, 9:1 (1987): 32-40. Kline, Jim. The complete films of Buster Keaton (New York: Carol Pub. Group, 1993) Knopf, Robert. The theater and cinema of Buster Keaton (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999) McPherson, Edward. Buster Keaton: tempest in a flat hat (New York: Newmarket Press, 2005) Moews, Daniel. Keaton: the silent features close up (Berkeley: University of California Press, c1977) Orvell, Miles. ‘Film: The Camera and the Magic of Self-Transformation in Buster Keaton’, Western Humanities Review, 27:3 (Summer 1973): 300 Pasquier, Sylvain du. ‘Buster Keaton’s Gags’, Journal of Modern Literature 3:2 (1973): 269-291 [mainly on Cops and often very technical, but with a distinction between gags and the comic which we might find useful] Perez, Gilberto. ‘The Bewildered Equilibrist: An Essay on Buster Keaton’s Comedy’, Hudson Review, 34:3 (Autumn 1981) 337-366. Rohmer, Éric. ‘The General’, Positif; 400 (June 1994): 114-116. Sarris, Andrew. ‘Buster Keaton’ in “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet”: the American talking film, history & memory, 1927-1949 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) Sesonske, Alexander. ‘Pre-established harmony and other comic strategies’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 55 (1997): 253-61. Telotte, J. P. ‘Keaton Is Missing’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 23:2 (1995): 91-98. Trahair, Lisa. ‘The Ghost in the Machine: The Comedy of Technology in the Cinema of Buster Keaton’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 101:3 (2002): 573-88. Trahair, Lisa. ‘The Narrative-Machine: Buster Keaton’s Cinematic Comedy, Deleuze’s Recursion Function and the Operational Aesthetic’, Senses of Cinema: An Online Film Journal Devoted to the Serious and Eclectic Discussion of Cinema, 33 (Fall 2004) [http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/04/33/keaton_deleuze.html] Trahair, Lisa. ‘Short-Circuiting the Dialectic: Narrative and Slapstick in the Cinema of Buster Keaton’, Narrative, 10:3 (2002):307-25. Warshow, Paul. ‘More is less: comedy and sound (Keaton’s The General)’, Film Quarterly, 31:1 (Fall 1977): 38-45.


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Week 14 Travel writing and autobiography: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) Gustavus Vassa died in 1797, leaving property to his wife and daughters, an English gentleman, lamented by his many friends, and celebrated for his profitable writings, especially his autobiography. He had come quite a journey. He was English by adoption, or rather by abduction. By his own account he was born in Africa and what is now Nigeria in 1745 (this could possibly be a fiction: some scholars think he might have been born in South Carolina, but we’ll stick with his account). He tells us that when he was 11 he was kidnapped and enslaved. In due course he was thrown into a slaving ship and taken to Barbados. From that moment onwards the course of his life is defined by a series of journeys: to Virginia, to England, back to the West Indies where in 1766 he was able to purchase his freedom, back to the American Colonies, then all over the place as a sailor, to America again to manage a slave-run plantation, and finally back to London in 1777 when he became involved in the campaign against slavery and in supporting the black community in Britain. In these travels he crosses huge cultural as well as physical spaces. He has become a Christian; one of his owners has given him another name (Gustavus Vassa); and he has become English, not just legally, but in spirit. At one point in his travels he expresses a wish to return “to England, where my heart had always been” (ch. 8). The title of his autobiography in itself indicates how complex his identity has become: The Interesting Narrative Of The Life Of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by himself. He has both an African and a European name, and he attaches the label ‘African’, ironically enough, to the latter. The book also has a complex identity, in which travel-writing combines with other genres, such as spiritual autobiography, and the emergent genre of the slave narrative. We will be thinking about the book’s generic identity and how to relate it to Equiano / Vassa’s cultural and racial identities. SET READING The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789), chs. 1-3. FURTHER READING Equiano, Olaudah. The interesting narrative and other writings, ed. Vincent Carretta. rev. edn. (London: Penguin Books, 2003) Andrews, William L. and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds. Slave narratives (New York: Library of America, 2000) Apap, Christopher. ‘Caught between two opinions: Africans, Europeans, and Indians in Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative’, Comparative American Studies, 4 (2006): 5 - 24.


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Carretta, Vincent. Equiano, the African: biography of a self-made man (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005) Carretta, Vincent and Philip Gould, eds. Genius in bondage: literature of the early Black Atlantic (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2001) Carrigan, Anthony. ‘Negotiating Personal Identity and Cultural Memory in Olaudah Equiano’s “Interesting Narrative”‘, Transnational Journal of International Writing, 48 (2006): 42-47. Finseth, Ian. ‘In Essaka Once: Time and History in Olaudah Equiano’s Autobiography’, Arizona Quarterly, 58:1 (2002): 1-35. Lovejoy, Paul E. ‘Autobiography and Memory: Gustavus Vassa, alias Olaudah Equiano, the African’, Slavery & Abolition, 27:3 (December 2006): 317 – 347. Marren, Susan. ‘Between Slavery and Freedom: The Transgressive Self in Olaudah Equiano’s Autobiography’, PMLA, 108 (1993): 94-105. Murphy, Geraldine. ‘Olaudah Equiano, Accidental Tourist’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 27 (1994): 551-68. Plasa, Carl. Textual politics from slavery to postcolonialism: race and identification (Houndmills: Macmillan, 2000) Potkay, Adam and Sandra Burr, eds. Black Atlantic writers of the eighteenth century: living the new exodus in England and the Americas (Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1995) Rice, Alan. Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic (London: Continuum, 2003) Rust, Marion. ‘The Subaltern as Imperialist: speaking of Olaudah Equiano’, from Elaine Ginsberg, ed. Passing and the Fictions of Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996) Treadwell, James. Autobiographical Writing and British Literature, 1783-1843 (Oxford: OUP, 2005) Walvin, James. An African’s life: the life and times of Olaudah Equiano, 1745-1797 (Washington: Cassell, 1998)


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Week 15 Travel writing and the elusive self: Wollstonecraft in Scandinavia Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) is known today principally as a pioneering feminist. Of her works, it is perhaps A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) that is now most read. To readers who know Wollstonecraft only through that book, the Wollstonecraft of these letters will come as something of a surprise. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is informed by a spirit of Enlightenment rationality. Though at the time of its publication Wollstonecraft was practising what she preached to the extent of making her living as a professional writer (no mean feat for a woman in her day), many of her views were the product more of thinking than experience. Nowhere was this more than case than in her views of sexual relations and romance. By 1795, when she writes the Letters Written During a A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark that had changed. She had spent two years in Revolutionary Paris, during which she witnessed the execution of Louis XVI and the coming of the Terror. But she had also undergone a private revolution. She fell in love with an American merchant and adventurer, Gilbert Imlay. They never married, but they had a daughter. The affair also produced some of Wollstonecraft’s most arresting writing: her private letters to her lover. They are intense, passionate, and demanding -- full of emotion. Not the kind of thing one would have expected from the author of A Vindication. And as Imlay lost interest in her, the letters became desperate. In 1795 the affair was coming to an end -- to Wollstonecraft’s dismay. While she was casting about for some way to reignite Imlay’s love, she agreed to go to Scandinavia to sort out a business problem for him. According to the researches of Per Nyström, Imlay had acquired a French ship, La Liberté, which he renamed the Maria and Margaretha, and entrusted to a Norwegian captain. The idea was to re-register the ship as Norwegian, and use it to run the British blockade to which French ports were subjected. Since Norway was neutral, its vessels would not be stopped. He had it loaded with silver and plate, and sent it north to buy stores. However, temptation overcame the Norwegian captain. He made off with the ship and the money.* This is the problem that Wollstonecraft goes to Scandinavia to try to resolve for her lover. However, Wollstonecraft was true enough to her feminist principles to want to remain economically independent of Imlay, no matter how demanding she could be of him emotionally. She announces to Imlay in one of her letters that she has started to write a book about her journey. This is what becomes the Letters Written During a Short Residence. These were intended for publication, unlike her private Letters to Imlay, which were published only after her death. None of the details of her love affair or of Imlay’s business affairs appear in the Short Residence. Wollstonecraft’s presentation of herself as a lonely wanderer in a bleak landscape, on some unspecified mission, and suffering from some unspecified anguish is a striking Romantic self-portrait: full of doom and inner conflict. Yet the Enlightenment, rational and progressive side of her is on display too. The startling range of different aspects


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of herself on display in the Short Residence makes the work a fascinating study in authorial self-presentation. * See Per Nyström, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Scandinavian Journey, Acts of the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences at Gothenburg, Humaniora, no. 17, 1980. SET READINGS

• from Wollstonecraft, Mary. Letters Written During a Short Journey in Sweden, Norway and Denmark

• from Holmes, Richard. ‘Introduction,’ in Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, A Short Residence and Sweden, Norway and Denmark and Memoirs of the Author of ‘The Rights of Woman’, ed. Richard Holmes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987)

FURTHER READING Secondary Reading Bahar, Saba. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002)

Black, Jeremy. The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1992) Bohls, Elizabeth A. Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716-1818 (Cambridge: CUP, 1995)

Buzard, James. The beaten track: European tourism, literature, and the ways to culture, 1800-1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) Conger, Syndy McMillen. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Language of Sensibility (London: Associated University Press, 1994)

Falco, Maria J. Feminist interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996)

Holmes, Richard. ‘Introduction’ in Mary Wollstonecraft & William Godwin, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, and Memoirs of the Author of the Rights of Woman (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987)

Johnson, Claudia L. ed. The Cambridge companion to Mary Wollstonecraft (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)

Jump, Harriet Devine. Mary Wollstonecraft - Writer (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994) {828.6WOL EN}

Lorch, Jennifer. Mary Wollstonecraft, Berg Women’s Series (New York: Berg, 1990)

Mellor, Anne K. ed. Romanticism and Feminism (Bloomington, Indiana UP, 1988)


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Mellor, Anne K. ed. Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1992)

Moore, Jane. Mary Wollstonecraft, Writers and their Work (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1999) {828.6WOL}

Myers, Mitzi. ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written... in Sweden: Towards Romantic Autobiography’, in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 8 (1979): 165-85.

Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: ideology as style in the works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) {823.709POO}

Rodgers, Katherine M. Feminism in Eighteenth-Century England (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982)

Taylor, Barbara. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: CUP, 2003)

Todd, Janet. Mary Wollstonecraft: a revolutionary life (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000)

Some eighteenth-century and Romantic travel writing Bohls, Elizabeth A. and Ian Duncan, eds. Travel Writing 1700-1830: an anthology (Oxford: OUP, 2005) Hazlitt, William. ‘On going a journey’ in Hazlitt, Table Talk; or, Original Essays (1821-4) (London: J.M. Dent, 1908) Johnson, Samuel and James Boswell. A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1775/1786) (London: Penguin, 1984) Rogers, Samuel. The Italian journal of Samuel Rogers, ed. J. R. Hale (London: Faber, 1956) Shelley, Mary & Percy Bysshe. History of a six weeks' tour (1817; Oxford: Woodstock, 1989) Smollett, Tobias. Travels Through France and Italy (1766) (Oxford: OUP, 1981) Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768), ed. Graham Petrie, intr. A. Alvarez (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967) Wordsworth, William. ‘Description of the Scenery of the Lakes’ and ‘A Guide through the District of the Lakes’ in Selected Prose, ed. John O. Hayden (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988) [Some of Wordsworth’s poems could also be considered a kind of travel writing, including ‘Tintern Abbey’ and much of The Prelude.]


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Week 16 Emma and the development of the novel Emma is a novel. On the face of it that looks almost too obvious to be worth saying. But what does the genre of the novel imply, and what expectations are legitimately created in the reader on identifying what they’re reading as a novel? One might point to a couple of things: a novel is a prose narrative, rather than a drama or a poetic narrative; and it is fiction rather than fact. Both these things, again, seem entirely obvious. What we’re going to do in this session is think about Emma in relation to the form and development of the novel as such, to see if attention to this basic genre label can help us to become more aware of what the text is and how it works. For example, to start from the two features of the novel just identified (that it is prose narrative and that it is fiction) these two things may become intriguing in the experience of reading. That the novel is a prose narrative means, on the face of it, that we’re putting to one side the expectations of self-expression that, say, lyric poetry legitimately arouses. Yet we readily talk of novels as if they did in some sense express a distinctive vision on the part of the author. At the same time, while novels may be fictional, the main line of development of the English novel is of a fiction that is fact-like – that may draw extensively upon fact, and may even sometimes be confused with fact. So the novel’s fictiveness isn’t entirely straightforward either, given the dominance of realism in the tradition of the novel. Starting from such questions, especially the question of the novel’s realism and its representation of reality, we will consider Emma in relation to the form and social function of the novel. SET READING Austen, Jane. Emma, ed. Nicola Bradbury (Ware: Wordsworth, 2000) For this session please read at least to the end of chapter 28 (p. 175 in the Wordsworth edition). FURTHER READING Adams, Percy G. Travel literature and the evolution of the novel (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983) Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: four essays, trans. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981) Booth, Wayne C. Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1961) Brown, Julia Prewitt. Jane Austen’s novels: social change and literary form (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1979)


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Davis, Lennard J. Factual fictions: the origins of the English novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983) Eagleton, Terry. The English novel: an introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005) Ferguson, Frances. ‘Jane Austen, Emma, and the Impact of Form’, Modern Language Quarterly, 61 (2000): 157 Fitzgerald, Laurie. Shifting genres, changing realities: reading the late -eighteenth-century novel (New York: P. Lang, 1995) Hawthorn, Jeremy. Studying the Novel, 4th edn. (London: Arnold, 2001), esp. chs. 2 (on the development of the novel) and 3 (on the analysis of novels) Hunt, Linda C. A woman’s portion: ideology, culture, and the British female novel tradition (New York: Garland Pub, 1988) Hunter, J. Paul. Before novels: the cultural contexts of eighteenth-century English fiction (New York: Norton, 1990) Kahler, Erich. The inward turn of narrative, trans. Richard & Clara Winston; foreword Joseph Frank (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973) McKeon, Michael, ed. Theory of the novel: a historical approach (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000) Rajan, Tilottama and Julia M. Wright, eds. Romanticism, history, and the possibilities of genre: re-forming literature, 1789-1837 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) Ross, Deborah. The excellence of falsehood: romance, realism, and women’s contribution to the novel (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991) Waldron, Mary. Jane Austen and the fiction of her time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) Watson, Nicola J. Revolution and the form of the English novel, 1790-1825: intercepted letters, interrupted seductions (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) Watt, Ian. The rise of the novel: studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957) [and see also Reconsidering the Rise of the Novel, a special issue of Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 12:2-3 (2000)]. Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961) Williams, Raymond. The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970), introduction.


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Week 17 Emma as costume drama Emma has been dramatised many times for television and has recently become a Hollywood blockbuster. In the last few years there has been a vogue for films of Austen’s work. Some of the novels have been filmed for TV several times (ITV released three in 2007 alone); among recent films there have been Ang Lee’s Sense And Sensibility (1995), Patricia Rozema’s Mansfield Park (1999), Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice (2000) and McGrath’s Emma (1996). In all Austen has achieved some forty movie credits. Lately she has also had the doubtful honour of appearing in front of the cameras as a character in Becoming Jane Austen (2007). Jane Austen is perhaps more famous now than she has ever been. Austen’s cinematic celebrity is hard to avoid. What effect does it have on someone coming to the novels for the first time, even if their copy of Emma does not have a photograph of Gwyneth Paltrow on the cover? Does Austen’s prolific film career affect the way we read her fiction? All the adaptations mentioned above are costume dramas, and each of the words in this genre label points to something that has been changed in the process of bringing Jane Austen’s work to the screen. First of all the novels have mutated from narrative fiction into film or television drama, and this may be of some special significance if one thinks, for example, of the way drama and theatricality are criticised in Mansfield Park, where the inappropriate intrusion of amateur theatre into a private (if grand) house is one of the turning points of the story. But these films are not just a drama, they are also period drama. That may seem unremarkable. It might not seem to be a transformation at all. If these films are all set in the period in which Austen wrote and set them, surely that’s not changing anything; it’s simply being faithful to the novels. In one sense, maybe. But from her point of view her novels were not set ‘in period’. They were no more costume drama and than Friends is today. So the fact that these are from our point of view period films may make a difference to the terms on which we see them. We will be thinking about how the novel has been changed generically in the process of being dramatised, and then ask ourselves whether the film shifts our generic perception of the novel. SET VIEWING Emma, dir. Douglas McGrath (USA: Miramax Films, 1996) SET READING Irvine, Robert P. Jane Austen, Routledge Guides to Literature (London: Routledge, 2005), especially pp. 148-56 FURTHER READING Birtwistle, Sue and Susie Conklin. The making of Pride and Prejudice (London: Penguin Books, 1995) [On the making of the BBC television series] Duckworth, Alistair M. ‘Emma’ (movie reviews), Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 10:1 (Oct, 1997):110-17.


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Duguid, Lindsay. ‘Emma’ (movie reviews), Times Literary Supplement, no. 4878 (Sept 27, 1996): 19. Hoberg, Tom. ‘The Multiplex Heroine: Screen Adaptations of Emma’, in Barbara Tepa Lupack, ed. Nineteenth-century women at the movies: adapting classic women’s fiction to film (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999), pp. 106-28. Kaplan, Deborah. ‘Mass Marketing Jane Austen: Men, Women, and Courtship in Two Film Adaptations’, in Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield, eds. Jane Austen in Hollywood (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), pp: 177-87. Lauritzen, Monica. Jane Austen’s Emma on television: a study of a BBC classic serial (Göteborg, Sweden: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1981) MacDonald, Gina and Andrew MacDonald, eds. Jane Austen on screen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), esp. Monaghan’s essay. Matthews, Peter. ‘Emma’ (movie reviews), Sight and Sound, 6:9 (Sept, 1996): 40. Sutherland, Kathryn. Jane Austen’s textual lives: from Aeschylus to Bollywood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) Werker, Anke. By a lady: Jane Austen’s female archetypes in fiction and film (Tilburg, The Netherlands: Tilburg University Press, 1998) Wiltshire, John. Recreating Jane Austen (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001) On general issues of adaptation and reinterpretation: Andrew, Dudley. ‘Adaptation’ in Concepts in Film Theory (New York: OUP, 1984) Morris Beja, Film and literature, an introduction (New York: Longman, 1979) Cartmell , Deborah and Imelda Whelehan, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen (Cambridge: CUP, 2007) Elliott, Kamilla. Rethinking the novel/film debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) Miller, Jonathan. Subsequent Performances (London: Faber and Faber, 1986) Stam, Robert. Literature Through Film (New Malden: Blackwell, 2005) Ginette, Vincendeau, ed. Film/literature/heritage: a sight and sound reader (London: British Film Institute, 2001)


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Week 18 Reading week Week 19 Emma as comedy To say that Emma is a novel by no means exhausts its possible genres, since, as we started the course by noting, genres do not comprise a neat system. We are going to start our exploration of the other genres of Emma with one whose name Austen herself would have recognized: comedy. Austen is often said to be a comic novelist, though it is not always easy to see of exactly what kind. So we will begin our session by reviewing some ideas about comedy, especially a number of neo-classical ideas that Austen herself would have been familiar with. First of all, comedy is usually funny. But classical and neoclassical criticism tended to be wary of pleasure for its own sake, partly because it seemed to many that all entertainments had some moral effect, and that therefore a worthwhile comedy should have a good moral effect, and should be improving. Therefore many classical and neoclassical writers were drawn to satire: comic exposure of corrigible human faults. And they were disparaging of attempts to find laughter in conditions that people could do nothing about, since laughing at some inborn inadequacy wasn’t morally improving, it was simply cruel. Some theories of laughter (such as Lucretius’s or Hobbes’s) maintained that this kind of unfeeling assertion of one’s superiority over others was something with which laughter was inextricably connected. It is possibly significant in this context that Austen makes her heroine someone who is apt to feel superior to others, who is firmly reproved at one point in the novel for making fun of someone in a morally unacceptable way; and whose mistakes and misunderstandings form much of the novel’s amusement. But this by no means exhausts the novel’s relation to comedy. We will also consider it in relation to comedy of manners and romantic comedy among other kinds. SET READING Please read the rest of the novel and the following essay: Polhemus,Robert. ‘Jane Austen's Comedy’, in J. David Grey, ed. The Jane Austen Companion (New York: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 60-71. FURTHER READING Bilger, Audrey. Laughing feminism: subversive comedy in Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998)

Brownstein, Rachel M. ‘Jane Austen: Irony and Authority’, Women's Studies, 15 (1988): 57-70.


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Castellanos, Gabriela. Laughter, war, and feminism: elements of carnival in three of Jane Austen’s novels (New York: P. Lang, 1994) [Bakhtin] Ehrenpreis, Irvin. Acts of implication: suggestion and covert meaning in the works of Dryden, Swift, Pope, and Austen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980) Everett, Barbara. Jane Austen: hard romance... (London: School of Advanced Study, University of London, 1996) [The Hilda Hulme lecture; 1995] Fullbrook, Kate. ‘Jane Austen and the Comic Negative’, Sue Roe, ed. Women Reading Women's Writing (Brighton: Harvester, 1987) Harding, D.W. Regulated hatred and other essays on Jane Austen, ed. Monica Lawlor (London: Athlone Press, 1998) Helm, William Henry. Jane Austen and her country-house comedy (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1909) Jenkyns, Richard. A fine brush on ivory: an appreciation of Jane Austen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) Leggatt, Alexander. English stage comedy, 1490-1990: the persistence of a genre (London; New York: Routledge, 1998) Morris, Ivor. Mr Collins considered: approaches to Jane Austen (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987) Mudrick, Marvin. Jane Austen, irony as defense and discovery (Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1952) Odmark, John. An understanding of Jane Austen’s novels: character, value and ironic perspective (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981)

Polhemus, Robert. ‘Jane Austen's Comedy’, in J. David Grey, ed. The Jane Austen Companion (New York: Macmillan, 1986)

Tauchert, Ashley. Romancing Jane Austen: narrative, realism, and the possibility of a happy ending (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) See also the general reading on comedy for week 13 on p. 34, above.


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Week 20 Travelling in England: sense of place in Cobbett’s Rural Rides and John Clare’s ‘Journey out of Essex’ This week we are travelling in England, in the company of two contemporaries of Jane Austen: the poet John Clare and the radical William Cobbett. They were both born into agricultural labour, and we’ll be using their very different perceptions of England to supplement what Austen has already shown us of rural life in the early nineteenth century. The excerpt from Cobbett comes from Rural Rides. He published it episodically between 1822 and 1826, and as a book in 1830. At one level it is a state of the nation survey of a kind one can find in earlier works by such writers as Daniel Defoe, Celia Fiennes, and William Camden (and in some later ones: H.V. Morton made his name as a travel writer in the mid twentieth-century mainly by travelling around Britain). In Cobbett’s view the state of the nation is parlous: the countryside is in crisis. He had been born in Sussex, and had worked as an agricultural labourer before joining the army and acquiring a little education. Thus equipped, he became a radical, tirelessly protesting against the way a changing economy was devastating the lives of working people in the country. He himself experimented with different forms of agriculture, both in England and in America where he lived for a time, and about which he wrote in A Year’s Residence in the United States of America (1819). Though these pages on Surrey and adjacent counties find him exercising some self-restraint, Cobbett’s rides were usually peppered with his fulminations against stock-jobbing, the nouveaux riches, the government, paper money, Oxford (a particular bugbear: he hated Oxford and all its idle learning) – anything that threatened his vision of England. There was plenty to threaten it, what with industrialisation, the continuing enclosure (i.e. privatisation) of common land, and the wars with France, which had finally ended in an economic slump. The result was a prolonged period of political instability that would see Britain come closer to republicanism than at any time since 1660. William Cobbett was no revolutionary, but he demanded reform of parliament so that it would represent everyone, and not just the wealthy. When parliament was partly reformed in 1832 Cobbett became an MP. But if Cobbett was a radical, he was a backward-looking one. Riding around East Anglia he was roused to fury at the contrast between the wretched condition of the working people, and the perfect condition that he thought Britain had once enjoyed: “God has given us the best country in the world; our brave wise and virtuous fathers, who built all these magnificent churches, gave us the best government in the world, and we, their cowardly and foolish and profligate sons, have made this once-paradise what we now behold!’ Cobbett’s radicalism, paradoxically, took the form of bulldog conservatism. These pages can read as travel writing. But one might ask oneself what else they could be seen as, and how their form and manner of addressing the reader and of constructing the landscape relate to the times in which Cobbett wrote them.


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John Clare’s ‘Journey out of Essex’ finds a man of similar background to Cobbett, but of a completely different cast of mind. Clare is making his painful, visionary, bewildered way across England in 1841, from the lunatic asylum where he’s been placed to his native Helpston in Northamptonshire. Born into the rural working class, Clare faced immense problems in making his way as a writer. For a time he’d been successful. But by the 1830s he was unable to support his family, and his mind was becoming unstable. Perhaps not surprisingly, Clare toyed with adopting Byron’s persona: in his early days in the Essex asylum he rewrote Childe Harold to make of it his own story of loss. In this journey, though, he’s persuaded himself that Mary Joyce (his idealised, lost love) is waiting for him in Northamptonshire. In fact the real Mary Joyce was three years dead. What Clare was travelling towards was his real wife, Patty, who would find him impossible to handle, and five months later would have him committed to the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, where he spent the rest of his life. SET READINGS

• from Cobbett, William. Rural Rides (1830) • Clare, John. ‘Journey Out of Essex’ (1841) • from Mulvilhill, James. ‘The Medium of Landscape in Cobbett’s Rural Rides,

Studies in English Literature, 33:4 (1993): 825-40. FURTHER READING Barrell, John. The idea of landscape and the sense of place, 1730-1840: an approach to the poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972) Clare, John. John Clare: The Oxford Authors, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Oxford: OUP, 1984) Cobbett, William. Selected Writings, ed. Leonora Nattrass (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998) Dyck, Ian. William Cobbett and Popular Rural Culture (Cambridge: CUP, 1992) Gilmartin, Kevin. Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) [excerpt: http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/conspiracy/gilmartin/kg2.html] Haughton, Hugh, Adam Phillips, Geoffrey Summerfield, eds. John Clare in context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) Hazlitt, William. ‘Mr. Cobbett’ in Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age (1825), ed. E.D. Mackerness, 2nd edn. (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1991) Lucas, John. John Clare (Plymouth: Northcote House in association with The British Council, 1994)


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McCalman, Iain. Radical Underworld: prophets, revolutionaries and pornographers in London, 1795-1840) Nattrass, Leonora. William Cobbett: the politics of style (Cambridge: CUP, 1995) Sinclair, Iain. Edge of the Orison: in the traces of John Clare’s ‘Journey out of Essex’ (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005) [travel writing] Williams, Raymond. Cobbett (Oxford: OUP, 1983) Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society 1780-1950 (1958; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961) Wilson, David A. Paine and Cobbett: The Transatlantic Connexion (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988) [see part 2, if interested in Cobbett’s travels to the USA] Some other examples of travel writing about England Bryson, Bill. Notes from a Small Island (New York: Doubleday, 1995) Camden, William. Britannia, trans. Philemon Holland (1607), ed. Dana F. Sutton, at http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/cambrit/ Defoe, Daniel. A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-6), 2 vols. (London: Dent, 1962) Fiennes, Celia. The illustrated journeys of Celia Fiennes, 1685-c.1712, ed. Christopher Morris, rev. edn. (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1995) Jerome, Jerome K. Three Men in a Boat (1889) [repeatedly reprinted] Lane, Maggie. Jane Austen’s England (London: Hale, 1986) Morton, H.V. In Search of England (1927) [and many other travel books] Sanderson, Caroline. A Rambling Fancy: In the Footsteps of Jane Austen (London: Cadogan, 2006)


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Week 21 Emma as Bildungsroman As the word implies, Bildungsroman is a genre that was initially formulated in German thought and literature. The Bildungsroman is a novel of personal development or education. It typically shows how its main character develops from childhood and grows to maturity. The novel that in some sense founded the genre is Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795). The main character is often also an artist, and such novels are frequently autobiographical. Good examples of the Bildungsroman in English include Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Why is the Bildungsroman identified as a genre around 1800? Possibly just because critics like to proliferate labels. But it might also make sense the people were writing books with a special emphasis on individual development and at this particular moment felt the need for some special label for such books. It might reflect deeper cultural changes that make individual development an object of special interest. It’s true that some earlier English novels tell the story of a single life (for example Robinson Crusoe or Tom Jones), but arguably these do not quite have the sense of psychological uniqueness and of the difficulty of realising and becoming oneself and achieving one’s identity the one associates with the Bildungsroman. Crusoe and Jones certainly have moral lessons to learn, but there is not quite the same emphasis on individual growth and self-realisation. Emma is sometimes spoken of as a Bildungsroman, but it is not an unambiguous example. Austen writes at an intriguingly transitional moment for the English novel. In some respects she harks back to earlier fiction, especially in a firm and sometimes satirical sense of the moral framework of her fiction. But at other moments (especially in Mansfield Park) she anticipates Victorian fiction. Emma can certainly be read as a Bildungsroman, but doing so will emphasize some things and play down others. In other words, in examining Emma as a Bildungsroman we’re likely to need to consider not merely how to classify the novel, but how concepts of genre and the processes of reading interact with each other. SET READINGS

• from Boes, Tobias. ‘Modernist Studies and the Bildungsroman: A Historical Survey of Critical Trends, Literature Compass, 3:2 (2006), pp. 230-37;

• Hughes, R.E. ‘The Education of Emma Woodhouse’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 16 (1961): 69-74; and

• from Moffat, Wendy. ‘Identifying with Emma: Some Problems for the Feminist Reader’, College English, 53:1 (1991), pp. 51-56.

FURTHER READING Aers, David. ‘Community and Morality: Towards Reading Jane Austen’; in David Aers, Jonathan Cook and David Punter, eds. Romanticism and Ideology. Studies in English Writing 1765-1830 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981).


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Butler, Marilyn. Jane Austen and the war of ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) Cho, Sonjeong. An ethics of becoming: configurations of feminine subjectivity in Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot (London: Routledge, 2006) Jeffers, Thomas L. Apprenticeships: The Bildungsroman from Goethe to Santayana (New York: Palgrave, 2005). Mooneyham, Laura G. Romance, language and education in Jane Austen’s novels (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988) Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: the Bildungsroman in European culture (London: Verso, 1987) Morgan, Susan. In the meantime: character and perception in Jane Austen’s fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) Reddy, T. Vasudeva. Jane Austen: the dialectics of self actualisation in her novels (London: Oriental University Press, 1987) Ryle, Gilbert. ‘Jane Austen and the Moralists’ in B.C. Southam, ed. Critical Essays on Jane Austen (1968) Sabiston, Elizabeth Jean. The prison of womanhood: four provincial heroines in nineteenth-century fiction (London: Macmillan, 1987) Sulloway, Alison G. Jane Austen and the province of womanhood (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989) Tandon, Bharat. Jane Austen and the morality of conversation (London: Anthem, 2003) Thompson, James. Between self and world: the novels of Jane Austen (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988)


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Week 22 Teen Emma: Clueless At first glance the idea that Amy Heckerling’s high school comedy, Clueless (1996) has anything to do with Jane Austen seems ridiculous. Yet it follows the plot of Emma so closely as to be a version of the novel - albeit a version in which Emma has become Cher, a rich kid in Beverley Hills, Mr. Woodhouse has turned into a high-powered American lawyer, and Mr. Knightley is Cher’s stepbrother, Josh. It’s not the only one of Austen’s novels to have been relocated. Sense and Sensibility migrated to India as Kandukondain Kandukondain (Menon, 2000) and will surface in the Latino community of Los Angeles as Sense and Sensibilidad (Torres, 2008). Pride and Prejudice has been set in modern India in Bride and Prejudice (Chadha, 2004), and been moved to the US in Pride and Prejudice: A Latter-Day Comedy (Black, 2003). How can we describe what happens when a novel goes on its travels like this? One might say that what we’re getting is really a completely new work. Yet the relation of Clueless to Emma is clear enough for it to have been noticed. This cultural relocation of an old text is something for which there is ample precedent in the stage and film productions of Shakespeare’s plays, which have been relocated in all kinds of ways without anyone denying that these are versions of the original plays. For example, Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet is set in a fictionalised version of modern America, and Almereyda’s Hamlet takes place in present-day New York. Even when the adaptation is more radical, and the text completely rewritten, the resulting film may sometimes still be spoken of as a version of Shakespeare. For example, Kurosawa’s Throne Of Blood is often spoken of as an interpretation of Macbeth, even though it doesn’t include Shakespeare’s dialogue and it’s set in the Japan of the samurai. Among the questions we might consider are: If Clueless is a kind of interpretation of Emma, how does it see the novel, and in particular how does it see it generically? Does it change the way we perceive the novel’s genre? And, if Jane Austen’s novels were originally not period pieces, but contemporary stories, might there be a sense in which setting the story of Emma in the present could be true to the novel? SET VIEWING Clueless, dir. Amy Heckerling (USA: Paramount Pictures, 1995) SET READING

• Ferriss, Suzanne. ‘Emma Becomes Clueless’, in Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield, eds. Jane Austen in Hollywood (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), pp. 122-29. [Ferris compares Clueless with the ITV adaptation of Emma, the opening of which we saw in the seminar.]

• from Monaghan, David. ‘Emma and the art of adaptation’, in Gina MacDonald and Andrew MacDonald, eds. Jane Austen on screen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 212-19.

FURTHER VIEWING For other relocations of Austen’s stories, or collisions of Austen with modernity, see:


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• Bride and Prejudice, dir. Gurinder Chadha (UK/USA: Pathé Pictures International, 2004),

• Jane Austen in Manhattan, dir. James Ivory (UK/USA: Merchant Ivory Productions, 1980)

• Pride and Prejudice: A Latter-Day Comedy, dir. Andrew Black (USA: Bestboy Puctures, 2003).

FURTHER READING Dole, Carol M. ‘Classless, Clueless: Emma Onscreen’, in Marcia McClintock Folsom, ed. Approaches to teaching Austen’s Emma (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2004) Emma on Film, special issue of Persuasions online, Occasional papers No. 3 (1999), available at http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/opno3/toc.html Ferriss, Suzanne. ‘Emma becomes Clueless’, in Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield, eds. Jane Austen in Hollywood, 2nd edn. (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2001), ch. 8. Greenfield, John R. ‘Is Emma Clueless? Fantasies of Class and Gender from England to California’, Topic: a Journal of the Liberal Arts, 48 (Fall, 1997): 31-38. Harris, Jocelyn. ‘Clueless’ (review), Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 8:3 (April, 1996): 427-31. Kaplan, Deborah. ‘Mass Marketing Jane Austen: Men, Women, and Courtship in Two of the Recent Films,’ Persuasions 18 (1996): 171-87.

Lipman, Amanda. ‘Clueless’ (review), Sight and Sound, n.s., 5:10 (Oct, 1995):46. Macdonald, Gina and Andrew Macdonald, eds. Jane Austen on Screen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) Parrill, Sue Jane Austen on Film and Television: A Critical Study of the Adaptations (McFarland & Co., 2002) Sonnet, Esther. ‘From Emma to Clueless: Taste, Pleasure and the Scene of History’, in Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, eds. Adaptations: from text to screen, screen to text (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 51-62. Stern, Lesley. ‘Emma in Los Angeles: Remaking the Book and the City’, in James Naremore, ed. Film adaptation (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000), pp. 221-238. Wald, Gayle. ‘Clueless in the Neo-Colonial World Order’, in You-me Park and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, eds. The postcolonial Jane Austen (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 218-33. Wiltshire, John. Recreating Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)


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Week 23 Travel writing: London We’re drawing together the strands of our discussions of travel-writing this week by comparing excerpts from a variety of different kinds of travel-writing. We should also bear in mind the travel writing we’ve seen on the course so far. We’re concentrating on writing about London. Travel writing implicitly invites us to judge it by comparison with the reality it describes, and we can easily go out and look at London for ourselves, if we wish to. As we’ve seen throughout the course, travel-writing is tricky to pin down as a genre. One of the questions we’ll ask of these excerpts is whether they measure up to our expectations of what travel writing should be. Blake’s ‘London’, for example, plainly enough tells of a walk through the city, but it wouldn’t normally be classified as travel-writing. Plenty of things that are classified as travel-writing can devote page after page to history, reflections, and reminiscences without the writer travelling anywhere. Some genres of writing that depend upon footwork (to say nothing of cars, trains and ‘planes) are often spoken of as something other than travel-writing: travel guides, for example (for an example of this kind of writing about London, see Wikitravel’s guide at http://wikitravel.org/en/London). We’ll start by discussing what counts as travel writing and what doesn’t. We’ll then try to distinguish between these different kinds of writing. Since they could all be said to constitute travel writing in some sense, the obvious question is What sense? As we tussle with this, we’ll refine our understanding of the genres of travel in way that should help us read more imaginatively and attentively, and may help us to write more creatively and responsively. SET READINGS

• H.V. Morton, In Search of London (London: Methuen, 1951), pp. 1-19. • Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island (London: Doubleday, 1995), ch. 2. • Iqbal Ahmed, Sorrows of the Moon: In Search of London (2004; London:

Constable and Robinson, 2007), ch. 8. FURTHER READING Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: the experience of modernity (1982; London: Verso, 1983) Betjeman, John. Vintage London. Eleven plates in colour and twelve illustrations in the text (London, W. Collins, 1942) Caws, Mary Ann, ed. City Images: Perspectives from Literature, Philosophy, and Film (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1991) Certeau, Michel de. ‘Walking in the City’ in The Practice of Everyday, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) Gay, John. Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)


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Glinert, Ed. A Literary Guide to London (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000) [A guide book, with walks] Granta no. 65 (Spring 1999) [this issue, edited by Ian Jack, is devoted to London and is a kind of mini-anthology of contemporary writing about the city] Lehan, Richard. The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History (Los Angeles: UCLA Press, 1998) Literary London at www.literarylondon.org [online journal] Rennison, Nick. Waterstone’s Guide to London Writing (London: Waterstone’s, 1999) Sandhu, Sukdev. London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City (London: HarperCollins, 2003) Simmel, Georg. ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, rptd. in Simmel on Culture, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 1977) Sinclair, Ian. London Orbital: A Walk around the M25 (London: Granta, 2002) Stow, John. A Survey of London, ed. C. L. Kingsford, 2 vols. (1908) (originally written 1598-1603) Timms, Edward and David Kelley, eds. Unreal city: urban experience in modern European literature and art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985) Trench, Richard and Ellis Hillman, London Under London: A Subterranean Guide, (London: John Murray, 1984) Vansittart, Peter. London: A Literary Companion (London: Murray, 1992) Weinreb, Ben and Christopher Hibbert, The London Encyclopedia, rev. edn. (London: Macmillan, 1995) Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973)


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Week 24 Reinterpreting the western: Dead Man (Jarmusch, 1995) For our final session, partly by way of revision, we’re looking at a western, albeit a strange one. Depending upon how one looks at it, Dead Man is either so strange a western as not to be a western at all (one critic calls it a western under erasure; others have called it a post-western); or it is the distillation of the western. Likewise the story is so simple as almost to fail to be a story: William Blake goes west, gets shot, and dies. How can that take a whole movie? That summary of course omits something crucial. Between being shot and dying Blake becomes a legend. The whole movie shifts into liminal zones: between life and death; between fact and legend; between cinema and poetry (according to Jonathan Rosenbaum); and, importantly, between white and native America. For before dying, he makes a friend: a native American called Nobody, who’s half Blood and half Blackfoot. Nobody takes him to be William Blake, the Romantic poet. It has been said that the film is one of very few Westerns made for native Americans as much as for anyone else (Rosenbaum 2000: p. 26). Jarmusch left dialogue in the various Indian languages without subtitles because, he said, he “wanted it to be a little gift for those people who understand the language”. If you want to see what two native American spectators made of the film, see what Ward Churchill and Jacquelyn Kilpatrick have to say. The film raises questions about the possibility of understanding across cultures of kind pertinent also to travel-writing. It will also help us to draw together the strands of our consideration of the western, for example, by revisiting the question of whether there is a defining core to the genre. SET VIEWING Dead Man, dir. Jim Jarmusch (USA/Germany/Japan: Pandora Filmproduktion, JVC Entertainment Networks, Newmarket Capital Group, 12 Gauge Productions, 1995) SET READING Rickman, Gregg. ‘The Western under Erasure: Dead Man’, in Jim Kitses and Gregg Rickman, eds. The Western Reader (New York: Limelight Editions, 1998) FURTHER VIEWING Other experimental or poetic westerns:

• Brokeback Mountain, dir. Ang Lee (Canada/USA: Alberta Film Entertainment, Focus Features, Good Machine, Paramount Pictures, River Road Entertainment, 2005)

• Johnny Guitar, dir. Nicholas Ray (USA: Republic Pictures, 1954) • The Misfits, dir. John Huston (USA: Seven Arts Productions, 1961) • Ride in the Whirlwind, dir. Monte Hellman (USA: Proteus Films, 1965) • The Shooting, dir. Monte Hellman (USA: Proteus Films, 1967)

FURTHER READING Bromley, Roger. ‘Dead Man Tells Tale: Tongues and Guns In Narratives of The West’, European Journal of American Culture, 20:1 (2001): 50


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Churchill, Ward. Fantasies of the Master Race: literature, cinema and the colonization of American Indians, ed. M. Annette James (Monroe: Common Courage Press, 1992) Cummings, Denise K. ‘“Accessible Poetry”? Cultural Intersection and Exchange in Contemporary American Indian and American Independent Film’, Studies in American Indian Literatures: The Journal of the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures, 13:1 (Spring 2001): 57-80. Curnutte, Richard A., Jr. ‘Mad Poets: William Blake, Jim Jarmusch and Dead Man’, Film Journal, 1:1 (2002). DeAngelis, Michael. ‘Gender and other transcendences: William Blake as Johnny Depp’, in Murray Pomerance, ed. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls: gender in film at the end of the twentieth century (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), pp. 283-99. Hall, Mary Katherine. ‘Now you are a killer of white men: Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man and the traditions of revisionism in the Western’, Journal of Film and Video, 54:4 (Winter 2001): pp. 3-14. Jones, Kent. ‘Dead Man’ (review), Cineaste, 22:2 (Spring 1996): 45-46. Kilpatrick, Jacquelyn. Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and film (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1999) Lee, C. J. P. ‘Death as “Sanity”: The Nature of Death and Dead Man’s In/Difference; Dead Man – An Examen of Unconsciousness’, in The metaphysics of mass art: cultural ontology (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999) Levich, Jacob. ‘Western auguries: Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man’, Film Comment, 32:3 (May-June 1996): 39-41. Moliterno, Gino. ‘Dead Man’, (review), Senses of Cinema: An Online Film Journal Devoted to the Serious and Eclectic Discussion of Cinema, 14 (June 2001). http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/01/14/dead_man.html Nieland, Justus. ‘Graphic Violence: Native Americans and the Western Americans in Dead Man’, CR: The New Centennial Review, 1:2 (Fall 2001): 171-200 Pelzer, Peter. ‘Dead Man – an encounter with the unknown past’, Journal of Organizational Change Management, 15:1 (Feb 2002): 48 – 62. [odd and intriguing application of the film to problems in management theory, making much of the movie’s setting at an unstable point between two conditions: authentic wilderness and civilization] Rickman, Gregg. ‘The Western under Erasure: Dead Man’, in Jim Kitses and Gregg Rickman, eds. The Western Reader (New York: Limelight Editions, 1998)


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Rosenbaum, Jonathan. Dead Man (London: BFI, 2000) Rosenbaum, Jonathan. ‘A gun up your ass: an interview with Jim Jarmusch’, Cineaste, 22:2 (Spring 1996): 20-23. Salyer, Greg. ‘Poetry Written in Blood: Creating Death in S. Brent Plate and David Jasper, eds. Dead Man’, in Imag(in)ing otherness: filmic visions of living together (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999) Villella, Fiona A. ‘Lost in Paradise: The Cinema of Jim Jarmusch’, Screening the Past, 13 (December 2001), at http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr1201/fvfr13a.htm


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[ATTACH A COPY OF THIS SHEET TO EACH OF YOUR ESSAYS ]

MIDDLESEX UNIVERSITY

English Literature

ASSESSMENT COVER SHEET

Students must attach a copy of this cover sheet to every piece of assessment for ELS modules

STUDENT NUMBER: (Do not write your name here, or anywhere on the essay itself) MODULE CODE:

SEMINAR TUTOR’S NAME:

DATE: WORD LENGTH:

ESSAY TITLE:

PLAGIARISM DECLARATION: I have read and understood the pages in the ELS Handbook explaining plagiarism. I declare that the work in this assessment essay is my own, and written in my own words. The work of others is acknowledged by means of quotation, footnotes or bibliography. I acknowledge that, if my work is perceived to be plagiarised, I may be called to defend it in a meeting with two members of academic staff. Please tick one box to show that you accept respons ibility for understanding what plagiarism is and that penalties for it are se vere. Accept

Don’t accept


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Documents

Travelling Genres module handbook