Home>Courses>300 Level Courses> 356
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English 356A |
S. Finley |
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TTH 1- 2:30 |
HU III |
This course will be a seminar examination of the complex intersection of the three terms: self-identity and person, as shaped and marked by place, by a defining embeddedness in the density of history and locality, and how these interleaved formations are inflected by the cultural and national programs of the English and British 19th century. John Elder, writing recently in his Reading the Mountains of Home (1998), calls attention to "the natural, historical, and aesthetic thickness of the landscape." This "thickness" or density gathers and pools in local places, places which resist, never completely successfully, the erosive forces of space and time. Out of such resources, both figural and concrete, our identities are shaped. The Australian philosopher J. E. Malpas, in his Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (1999), has expressed these central concerns quite well. He points to the autobiographical novels of Proust, as crucial for his project, since in Proust he finds the "explicit thematising" of the "idea of human life as essentially a life of location, of self-identity as a matter of identity found in place, and of places themselves as somehow suffused with the 'human.'" Elizabeth Grosz reminds us, as well, of the political agency of place studies, since our human cultures are and have been threatened by spatial notions of conquest and colonization; terrible consequences are unavoidable "unless space (as territory which is mappable, explorable) gives way to place (occupation, dwelling, being lived in)." Heeding Grosz, we can hear why Edward Casey has completed and published a lengthy philosophical history of The Fate of Place (1997), in which he continues to protest the "neglect of place": "In the past three centuries in the West&emdash;the period of modernity&emdash;place has come to be not only neglected but actively suppressed. Owing to the triumph of the natural and social sciences in this same period, any serious talk of place has been regarded as regressive or trivial" (from Getting Back into Place [1993]). And, finally, here, I'll quote myself. This course will examine "the kind of autobiographical narrative where to recollect the self is to remember landscape, where the naming of the mysterious and indecipherable 'I' is a listing of dwelling places. What is remembered in such autobiographical acts is what has been sponsored by a particular place&emdash;a life that is written in which a narrative about life in place comes to pass" ( from "Scott, Ruskin, and the Landscape of Autobiography" [Studies in Romanticism: Figuring the Romantic Self]).
I provide these collations as, I hope, a sufficient expression of the seminar's principal focus. Readings will be gathered from texts mostly, but not exclusively, British and American, from the 19th century and early 20th century. We will read Wordsworth, Scott, Ruskin, Newman, Pater, and Proust (in translation), and others, with associated theoretical and philosophical studies. One cognate field to place studies is "humanistic geography," and some few readings will also be drawn from this more highly technical discourse. At least two field trips will be required to quite immediately local places that embody and express the "thickness" described by Elder. A complete class list of readings will be posted on the department's web-site by early summer. Inquiries or suggested readings from interested students are welcome: sfinley@haverford.edu.