Extension for Final Paper

All work must be uploaded to the shared folder on this blog no later than Friday, April 29, 5 pm. The folder is called "FINAL".

Send me an email message if you have questions, issues, etc.   -- Casey

Instructor's Final Note

Well, here we are at our final meeting of the seminar. We've learned many things, perhaps most of all--following Socrates--how many more things there are to learn. Victorian England was full of contrasts: extreme wealth & extreme poverty; forward and progressive politics (both Reform bills, etc.) & repressive and regressive politics (the Contagious Diseases Act, colonialism, etc.). As for art and culture, I think they had strong influences on world culture, again for good and bad, and that we are still part of the world that they largely created: Mass media, celebrity, government policing and incarceration, mass advertising, banking, currency, mass transit,  women's rights movements, organized crime, photography, electricity, recorded sound, telecommunication, etc. I could keep writing. What ideas do you have to add to the list? 

The PRB wasn't all that avant-garde, but other aspects of English culture in the 19th c. certainly were. They might have been reflecting the genuinely avant-garde culture of Paris and other urban centers in Europe, but they were never imitative. This gives, to me at least, PRB art a kind of kitschy charm. It's all inappropriately earnest and more than a little escapist. What does that tell us? Keep thinking. You are free to continue your investigations after the course ends. Keep me appraised. I've really loved our Thursday mornings this semester. Thanks. 

My stable email address is:  smithcaseysmith@gmail.com.

Pre-Raphaelite Gifts

JE Millais, Mariana
Why isn't this a bestseller?

Evelyn de Morgan, Phosphorus and Hesperus (1881)

WTF? This is too conceptual for me.

Stepping on DGR

Really messed up

Also really messed up.  A diaper bag?

Rossetti necklace flask. Now we're talking.

This is hard to explain on many levels. On other levels, maybe not so hard. Commercialism & consumerism know no bounds. Think about how we in the 21st century construct notions of "the Victorian" and the "19th century." 

You can purchase these wonderful items at Pre-Raphaelite Gifts on Cafe Press. Keep the magic alive after this seminar ends. 

Seminar Papers and Presentations NEXT WEEK

Things to remember for our final class next week...

1. Bring a hardcopy of your paper to class (you area also free to upload it to the blog). Undergrads (10-15 double-spaced text pages); grad (15-20).

2. Make sure your presentation comes in at under ten minutes. This will leave us a little bit of time for Q/A & discussion. I recommend using no more than a dozen slides.

3. Send me an email message if you're facing a crisis in research, writing, citation, copyediting, etc.  kcs@gwu.edu

4. Lastly, please remember to fill out the online course evaluation. Before doing so, review all of the blog posts and recall your reading of Sweet and Barringer. We covered a phenomenal amount of material this semester.

Victorian Web!

Here is an amazing online anthology, better than any textbook.

Final Change of Schedule

I think most members of the seminar could use next week to improve the research and writing of the final seminar paper and presentation, THEREFORE I'm changing the final two weeks in the following way. All of the presentation will take place on the final day of class, April 28. The undergraduates will be allotted fifteen minutes total to give a brief presentation (about ten minutes) and field questions (about five minutes). The graduate student will have slightly longer. All students should upload their presentation to the seminar's shared folder before class begins.  

I strongly recommend that the presenters limit the number of slides to around 10. For your presentation, focus on: 1) Argument, 2) Evidence, 3) Outcome. The same is true for your essay.

Next week will be a work week. Bring your laptops, research notes, etc. I'll also give my presentation on WJ Ibbett, the printer/poet who might have been the serial murderer commonly known as "Jack the Ripper." This will be the first public airing of my theory.

Oscar Wilde: Aesthete, Decadent, Romantic, Gay, Socialist...

Oscar Wilde. Where do we start? Like Morris, Wilde crammed in a lot of action in a relatively short life. Unlike Morris, Wilde died penniless in rough circumstances.  

Here's the text of the famous Preface. I'm looking for a facsimile from the 1891 edition. [Note: I found one on Hathitrust.] This is truly a case in which the layout of the type on the page carries meaning. The Adelaide E-book essentially changes the preface by making it more epigrammatic. It reads like a list of artistic commandments. 

Barbara Gates on Wilde's Dorian Grey:  Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories


 Here's the conceptual artist Allen Ruppersberg's take on Dorian Grey. He wrote out the novel on 20 large panels in 1974.

Wilde on video: Stephen Fry as Oscar

Oscar Wilde Himself, a BBC documentary from 1985

Aubrey Beardsley Dead at 25

Very few artists have created a style that is truly unique and inimitable. Aubrey Beardsley is one of them. His style has influenced countless artists, designers, and illustrators, but a Beardsley drawing is impossible to copy (even though countless forgers have tried).

In a 1998 profile of the Beardsley scholar Stephen Calloway in the New York Times, Martin Filler writes:

''Beardsley was one of the first artists to confront sexuality head on,'' Mr. Calloway maintained. ''The closest recent parallel, I suppose, is Robert Mapplethorpe, in the way he uses absolutely explicit imagery in a rather cool manner. They're both masters of black and white and share a similar temperament, that dispassionate way of producing things which are actually extremely outrageous. And the fact that they both died young has a curious new resonance as a result of AIDS and the linking of sex and death. Nobody ever appeared to die of sex in the 1960's, when it was the main aim of life.''

I'm not ready to call Beardsley's illustrations for Lysistrata pornographic, but they are sexually frank in a comic way. 

The BBC aired a strange and fascinating biographical portrait of Beardsley in 1982. 

Many people think of Beardsley as solely a graphic artist, but he had literary aspirations. Cypher Press in London published In Black and White: The Literary Remains of Aubrey Beardsley. Not surprisingly, Stephen Calloway is one of the editors.

An American in London: Whistler and the Thames

This is the best (and most recent) overview of Whistler's career I've seen: An American in London: Whistler and the Thames, from the brilliant Dulwich Picture Gallery in South London.

Whistler vs Morris: Two 1885 Texts

Compare these two pieces, both from January/February 1885:
William Morris's: A Talk with Mr William Morris on Socialism
JAM Whistler's: Ten O'Clock Lecture

An essay about Morris's response to Whistler's attacks in the Ten O'Clock: Lemire

And here's a little extra, in preparation of next week's discussion of Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley: Wilde's review of Whistler's Ten O'clock Lecture 

Wm Morris, Conundrum

This instructional video, with its breathless pace, leaves so much out. It highlights Morris's Ruskinian emphasis on work as potentially ennobling, if only the bosses could get it right, forsake profits, etc. This brief docu-vid never mentions Morris's work in the socialist lecture halls, his work in architectural preservation, his poetry, his art, or his crowning accomplishment, the Kelmscott Press. 

Speaking of which, you might remember seeing the massive Kelmscott Chaucer toward the end of our visit to the LC. I like these Peter Harrington (a bookseller) videos, because they show a lot of spreads and they spend time assessing the materiality of the book. Books are artifacts, after all. Here's a video looking at a rather decrepit Kelmscott Chaucer from Occidental College. 

These two videos about the Kelmscott Chaucer, different as they are, enact certain constructions of "Victorianism" that we encountered in Matthew Sweet's Inventing the Victorians. To learn more, see Bill and Sylvia Peterson's Kelmscott Chaucer Census. Without doubt, too much fetishistic adulation is poured on the Kelmscott Chaucer. Yet, the attention is perhaps warranted when we consider it as a kind of culmination of the PRB/Arts and Crafts aesthetic. Morris died soon after it was finished. We now know that he died relatively young because he spent his life sitting down: drawing those incessant borders, writing poetry and essays, and conducting business at Morris and Co.  It's hard for us to conceive how busy Morris was in his activities. This timeline gives an indication of his indefatigable work.

William Morris's work is a conundrum right at the center of the critical questions concerning this seminar: "Can you go forward by going back? Can a culture, a society, an art practice, move forward by emulating past models? Must an avant-garde forge a new path?"

Alice is in our blood...

Even if you haven't read any of the primary sources, Lewis Carroll's story has likely permeated your consciousness in certain ways. What does Alice signify to you? Write for 5 minutes.

Bigger than JK Rowling...

How can we account for the critical and popular success of Lewis Carroll's Alice series? In 150 years will people around the world be as obsessive about Harry, Hermione, and Ron? Why or why not? What is it about Alice that continues to fascinate us? The recent documentary, The Secret World of Lewis Carroll, addresses this question in charming fashion. 

Lewis Carroll

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Lewis Carroll's justly famous Alice in Wonderland. I had planned a class visit to UMD's Hornbake Library in College Park to see the Imholtz's exhibition, but the travel logistics don't allow it.

For next week's class, finish watching the recent BBC documentary, and read the first three chapters of Alice from this hathitrust link.

Choose your Presentation Date

Each member of the seminar will present their research (with images) on either April 21 or April 28. The presentations will be about 10-15 minutes, followed by 10-15 minutes of Q/A. Final papers are due no later than the start of class on April 28. 


April 21
1
2
3
4
5
6

April 28
1
2
3
4
5
6

New Essays Uploaded...

Here is a link to a few of the essays from this volume: After the Pre-Raphaelites.

Keep reading, keep researching, keep making connections. Next week in class, March 31, be prepared to talk briefly about ideas for your final seminar paper.  

REMINDER for Next Week

The Jefferson Building, Meet in front at 10:20.

Next week we'll be going to the Rare Book and Special Collections department of the Library of Congress for our only field trip of the semester. Your attendance for this session is of vital importance.
Our appointment is from 10:30 to noon. I would prefer for everyone to meet in class at 9:45 and to walk together to the Farragut West Metro. If you live on Capitol Hill or if it makes sense for your commute to meet us there, that's OK. The closet Metro station is Capitol South on the Blue/Orange line. Please let me know [kcs@gwu.edu] if we should expect to meet you there. Wait on the front patio area of the Jefferson Building (the old one). Text or call if you're lost or late: 202.460.6864.

If you would like to see items from particular artists and authors, please let me know and I'll see if I can include them. 

DUE NEXT WEEK: 
A one paragraph proposal for your essay on some aspect of  Pre-Raphaelite art and culture due March 24. Be sure that you clearly state what it is you want to explore and why. Type this up and bring it with you. I'll talk briefly with each student about his or her proposal.

An American View from 1876: PRB Saturation

Read this appraisal from 1876 to see how deep and wide the influence of the original PRB was on not only English art and culture but on developments in America and elsewhere. It's a short essay (725-732); please take a few minutes to read it.

Academic Essay Autopsy

Sometimes we take for granted how academic discourse actually works (and sometimes we're in such deep denial/fear that we never really learn). I want to help dispel or demystify the process. The best way to do this is to carefully and patiently examine an academic essay, to reveal its working parts and thereby better understand its operations. Almost any essay published in a scholarly journal would work for this exercise, but I think this one by Lucy Hartley works particularly well. 

Here's a good way to remember the most basic structure: IPSO.

Issue (clear description of subject)

Position (arguable not obvious about issue)

Support (evidence & examples)

Outcome (why does this matter)

Barringer on Ford Madox Brown's "Work"

I changed the splash-image for the class blog from Millais's famous painting Ophelia, to Ford Madox Brown's equally famous (well, not quite) Work.
Click here to watch a short video of the author of our textbook talking about this painting and its significance.