UNC Student Organization for Undergraduate Literature

If you're still in search of a neat course that fulfills a Group C requirement or a focus course, please read below - it only meets once a week and Professor Life is awesome!

English 842.1: Seminar in Victorian Literature
Dr. Allan Life
Tuesday
03:30-06:30
Enrollment: 15

We are happy to announce that the graduate seminar described below is now open to undergraduates. This is an opportunity to participate in a course with a graduate-level format, with discussion focused on four papers presented to the seminar by each student enrolled. In many respects, this course will resemble an undergraduate Honors seminar Dr. Life gave recently on Pre-Raphaelitism, but ENGL 842 will meet only once a week, in a three-hour session with a brief “intermission.” This format encourages maximum concentration on literary works by Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, William Morris, and A. C. Swinburne. For undergraduates, emphasis will be placed on your engagement with the texts, not on research into secondary sources. Since Pre-Raphaelitism began in 1848 as a revolution in British narrative painting, this course will also explore the visual art of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other leaders of the movement. If you have any questions about the seminar, please email Dr. Life at arlife@email.unc.edu.

Our topic in this seminar will be Pre-Raphaelitism; our focus will be on poetry by Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, William Morris, and A. C. Swinburne. We will concentrate on the close reading of specific literary works, and we will explore affinities between these works and visual art, including the pictures of the Pre-Raphaelites themselves. Another central concern will be the influence on the Pre-Raphaelites of such predecessors as Keats, and of such older contemporaries as Tennyson and Robert Browning. These investigations will deepen our understanding of what one scholar has called “one of the most dynamic movements of the nineteenth century and perhaps the most aesthetically fecund progenitor of the twentieth.”

Exams and papers: four papers (1,000 to 1,250 words) for oral presentation to the seminar and for submission on the days they are presented.
Teaching methods: discussion focused largely on the papers presented to the seminar.
Texts: Cecil Y. Lang, ed., The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Circle.

IMPORTANT NOTE: English 842.1 can count as a Group C OR focus course for the English major next semester.