The Reading List

You know the semester has begun and that I am procrastinating when this post goes up.  I’m taking three classes (because I’m insane like that) again and teaching First-year Writing.  My classes are: The Disappearing Subject: Unbounded Sensibility in Victorian Literature, Science and Aesthetics; and The History (and Theory) of the Book in America.  It’s a C19 semester!  I’m also doing an independent study on The Novel in Latin and South America.  I’ll be reading from translations for those, alas, because I do not speak Spanish.  But I’m taking it with a pretty well-known novel scholar here, and I want him on my committee.  Plus, this looks good on my transcripts for job market time.  This list will be long. Here goes.

The Disappearing Subject

Alfred Lord Tennyson, Maud and In Memoriam
Thomas Hardy, The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved
Edith Johnstone, A Sunless Heart
Robert Browning, various poems
George Eliot, The Lifted Veil
Richard Marsh, The Beetle
Wilkie Collins, Armadale
May Sinclair, Mary Olivier
George du Maurier, Peter Ibbetson
Henry Maudsley, Physiology and Pathology of Mind and Body and Will
Samuel Butler, Life and Habit
F.W.H. Myers, Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death
Sheridan Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly
Vernon Lee, The Beautiful

Articles

Nikolas Rose, “Assembling the Modern Self”
Theodor Lipps, “Empathy, Inner Imitation, and Sense-Feelings”
Dr. C.B. Ratcliffe, “A Speculation about Dreaming”
Forbes Phillips, “Ancestral Memory: A Suggestion”
Rae Greiner, “Sympathy Time: Adam Smith, George Eliot, and the Realist Novel”
Helen Stoddart, “‘The Precautions of Nervous People are Infectious’: Sheridan Le Fanu’s Symptomatic Gothic”
Athena Vrettos, “‘Little Bags of Remembrance’: du Maurier’s Peter Ibbetson and Victorian Theories of Ancestral Memory”

The History of the Book

Eds. Finkelstein and McCleery, The Book History Reader (We are reading too many essays from this to list them all)
Casper, Scott, et al., A History of the Book in America: Vol 2: The Industrial Book, 1840-1880.
Meredith McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853
Nathaniel Hawthorne, House of Seven Gables (supplementary)
Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770-1870
Thomas Paine, Common Sense (supplementary)
Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading
Emily Dickinson, Final Harvest
Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies
Walker, David Walker’s Appeal, In Four Articles: Together With A Preamble To The Coloured Citizens Of The World, But In Particular, And Very Expressly, To Those Of The United States Of America (supplementary)
Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (supplementary)
Thomas August, The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral life in Nineteenth-Century America
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (supplementary)
Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture
Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital

The Novel in Latin and South America (excuse the lack of accents)

Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions
Alejo Carpentier, Explosion in a Cathedral
Octavio Paz, Convergences
Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo
Elena Poniatowska, (I haven’t decided on a title yet because I still have to figure out which novels are translated)
Luisa Valenzuela, Clara
Roberto Bolano, The Savage Detectives, Amulet
Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star
Isabel Allende, Of Love and Shadows
Javier Marias, A Heart so White
Enrique Vila-Matas, Bartleby & Co.
Mario Vargas Llosa, The Feast of the Goat

There you have it: my semester.

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