Fall 2006 Courses

English 402-01: Seminars in British Authors: Charles Dickens (Çelikkol)

W 7-10pm, OM 003

Dickens was a prolific bestseller, public performer, and transatlantic celebrity in the nineteenth century.  His popularity continues today, as numerous recent theatrical adaptations, new print editions, and Hollywood productions such as Roman Polanski’s Oliver Twist (2005) suggest.  In this seminar, reading novels, sketches, short stories, and essays by Dickens, we will ask ourselves the question of what made Dickens so popular, with the understanding that intertwining formal, thematic, and ideological aspects of his work account for his appeal to Victorian as well as millennial audiences.  How did Dickens address and assuage anxieties about industrial growth? Why did he prefer to publish in serial installments?  What was at stake in representing social and political problems through the grotesque and the sentimental?  How did he reaffirm and challenge gender codes simultaneously? 

Child-wives, clumsy servants, industrial merchants, charitable prisoners, proud prostitutes, harsh disciplinarians, corrupt aristocrats: we will encounter such characters as we make our way through classics such as Hard Times and David Copperfield.  The themes we attend to will be as diverse as the characters Dickens offers us.  Middle-class housekeeping, professional authorship, imperial administration, women’s labor, and childhood memories are some of them.

This course is open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors.  For seniors, it will satisfy the capstone experience requirement.  Students will write one twelve-page research paper, informally present their weekly research as well as producing shorter formal papers and informal responses.  They will also prepare formal presentations on topics of their choice, which might range from Dickens’s London to Dickens as merchant.      

Fall 2006 Course Listings