English 321 - 19thC Science/Victorian Novel

'Explaining why we can't judge others' marriages, one Victorian narrator turns to science: 'Even with a microscope directed on a water-drop we find ourselves making interpretations which turn out to be rather coarse.' The microscope becomes a standard of seeing and simultaneously just one more mode of knowing. This course explores the ways science and the Victorian novel interact, in direct references but also in subtle shifts in theories of the senses, embodiment, self-creation, and what it means to 'see.' Nineteenth-century readings in neuroscience, physiology, aesthetics, and evolution with tangents to larger contexts. Novelists may include Eliot, Dickens, Bronte, Carroll, Verne, Trollope.'

Instructor Permission Required.