Spectacle and Spectators in London Literary Culture

Our sight is the most perfect and most delightful of all our senses. It fills the mind with the
largest variety of ideas, converses with its objects at the greatest distance, and continues the
longest in action without being tired or satiated with its proper enjoyments.
(Addison, The Spectator Papers 411)

Course Description: This course explores the act of seeing and the status of ‘the seen’ in eighteenth-century literature and culture. How does one recognize oneself in a crowd? How does one begin to represent and interpret the detail and grit of a city street, the artistic and narrative complexity of a painting or print, the visual excess of a theatrical performance; the strangeness of a “foreign” land? In a burgeoning urban arena—a social space in which power resided with those who could “read” the consumer, taste, character, and knowledge—readers and viewers understood faces, clothing, even postures as meaningful texts. Relying on theorists of the imagination and the visual, including Barbara Stafford, L.J. Jordanova, Peter de Bolla, and W.J.T. Mitchell we will examine the pleasures, but also the more troubling implications of aesthetics and the visual in eighteenth-century British literature. We will also explore the formal methods by which authors represented the visual in fiction, drama, poetry, and graphic works.

Course Requirements: Students will submit weekly “thought experiments” (20%), an interpretive paper of 6-8 pages (20%), and a final essay of 15 pages (45%) on a topic of their choosing. Students will also participate in seminar discussions and prepare presentations/annotated bibliographies on topics related to London visual and print culture (15%). While this is not an art history course, students will be encouraged and expected to “read” prints and paintings as a regular part of the syllabus.
Class Proceedings: The course will be run as a Socratic seminar. Students will be asked to read aloud thought experiments, present on assigned topics, and participate avidly in discussions. Course readings will focus on a variety of primary materials, including print and paintings, supplemented by short secondary readings.
* Students will also attend one mandatory film viewing (TBA)

Primary Texts
Addison and Steele, The Spectator Papers
John Gay, Trivia: Or, the Art of Walking
Jonathan Swift, “A Description of a City Shower,” “The Lady’s Dressing Room”
Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock
George Lillo, The London Merchant
William Hogarth, Various Works
Edmund Burke, Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
Sir Joshua Reynolds, Seven Discourses on Art
Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland
Fanny Burney, Evelina
Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an Opium Eater
Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments

*Class enrollment is limited to 15