08:432 Seminar in Victorian Literature: Spring 2003
Victorian Inscriptions of India

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Syllabus

Week 1 Jan 22 Introduction to the course and members of the class

Developing key terms: Hand-out from Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies. New York: Routledge, 1998.

Colonialism	Imperialism
Colonial discourse	Orientalism
Contrapuntal reading	Othering
Hegemony	Subaltern

Thomas Hood, "'I'm Going to Bombay'," (1832) from The White Man's Burdens: An Anthology of British Poetry of the Empire. Edited by Chris Brooks and Peter Faulkner. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996 (hand-out) hereafter WMB

Alfred Comyn Lyall, "Rajpoot Rebels," (1858) WMB
Charles Kingsley, "The Mango Tree," (1870) WMB
Alfred Comyn Lyall, "Badminton," (1876) WMB

*Schedule showing of Lagaan for the first week of February

Week 2 Jan 29 Entering India Then and Now

Geoffrey Moorhouse, India Britannica: A Vivid Introduction to the History of British India, 2000

Elleke Boehmer, "Imperialism and Textuality," in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995: 12-59. (on reserve)

I'll ask for volunteers to read one of these articles and summarize it for us (so that you can skim the others and return to them later.)

Sumit Sarkar. "Orientalism Revisted: Saidian Frameworks in the Writing of Modern Indian History." Oxford Literary Review 16 (1994): 203-21. (on reserve)

Bernard S. Cohen. "Representing Authority in Victorian India." In The Invention of Tradition. Edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. Cambridge UP, 1983: 165-209. (on reserve)

Nicholas B. Dirks. "Castes of Mind." Representations 37 (Winter 1992): 56-78.

Ronald Inden, "Orientalist Constructions of India," Modern Asian Studies 20 (1986): 401-46 (on reserve)

Week 3 Feb 5
Orientalism and Epistolarity: Articulating England through Scholarly Absorption in the Other

Elizabeth Hamilton, Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), edited by Pamela Perkins and Shannon Russell, Broadview

Thomas Babington Macauley, "excerpt from "Minute on Education," dated 2 February 1835, and addressed to Lord Bentinck, Governor-General

John Stuart Mill, "Memorandum of the Improvements in the Administration of India During the last Thirty Years," 1858

Week 4 Feb 12 Violent Possessions: Dying to Resist

Edward Meadows Taylor, Confessions of a Thug (1839), Oxford University Press

William Cavendish Bentinck: Minute on Sati, November 8, 1829 and Sati Regulaton of the Bengal Code (1829). Reprinted in Imperialism and Orientalism: A Documentary Sourcebook. Eds. Barbara Harlow and Mia Carter. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. (on reserve)

Lata Mani, "The Female Subject, the Colonial Gaze: Reading Eyewitness Accounts of Widow Burning." In Interrogating Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India. Ed. Tejaswini Niranjana, P. Sudhir, and Virek Dhareshwar. Calcutta: Seagull, 1993: 273-290. (on reserve)

William Sleeman. "A Suttee on the Nerbudda. From Rambles and Recollection of an Indian Official. Rept. Westminster: Constable, 1893. Vol. 1: 22-37.

Recommended:

Margery Sabin, "The Suttee Romance." Raritan11 (Fall 1991): 1-24.

Ania Loomba, "Dead Women Tell No Tales: Issues of Female Subjectivity, Subaltern Agency, and Tradition in Colonial and Post-colonial Writings on Widow Immolation in India." History Workshop Journal 36 (Autumn 1993): 209-27.

Week 5 Feb 19 Psychic Spaces: Traveling Through and Into Otherness

Richard Burton, Goa and the Blue Mountains (1851)

Parama Roy. Excerpt from Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. (on reserve)

Week 6 Feb 26

Indira Ghose, Women Travellers in India, Oxford University Press India, South Asia Books

Antoinette Burton, "Making a Spectacle of Empire: Indian Travellers in Fin-de-Siecle London." History Workshop Journal 42 (1996): 127-46.

Individual Reading: Sign up to read selections from either male or female travel writers for informal class reports

Week 7Mar 5 "Mutiny" Makes an Empire

Flora Annie Steel, A Face Upon the Waters (1897) (on reserve)

Dion Boucicault, Jessie Brown (1857) (on reserve)

Christina Rossetti, "In the Round Tower at Jhansi. 8 June 1857." WMB (on reserve)
Alfred Lord Tennyson, "The Defence of Lucknow," (1878) WMB (on reserve)

Recommended:

Gerald Massey, from "Havelock's March," (1860) WMB (on reserve)

Patrick Brantlinger, "The Well at Cawnpore: Literary Representations of the Indian Mutiny of 1857." Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1988.

Week 8 Mar 12

Hilda Gregg, "The English Mutiny in Fiction," Blackwood's Magazine 161 (Feb. 1897): 218-31.

Excerpts from newspapers and journals from Literature and Nation: Britain and India 1800-1990. Edited by Richard Allen and Harish Trivedi. New York: Routledge (and Open University), 2000: 225-41 (just skim)

DUE: Magazine reports I: "The Mutiny"/Securing the Empire

March 17-21 SPRING BREAK

Week 9 Mar 26 Colonial Crimes

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868), Oxford University Press

Week 10 Apr 2

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of the Four (1890), Penguin

Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Mystery of Uncle Jeremy's Household," reprinted in The Final Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, edited by Peter Haining. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1995: 41-79.

n.a. "Ask a White Man!" Punch, 14 June 1890 WMB (on reserve)

Week 11 Apr 9 Canonizing Colonialism

Rudyard Kipling, The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories (1885-1888)

Alfred Tennyson, "Opening of the Indian and Colonial Exhibition by the Queen," (1886) WMB (on reserve)

Rudyard Kipling, "The Widow at Windsor," (1892) WMB (on reserve)

DUE: Annotated Bibliography

Week 12 Apr 16

Rudyard Kipling, Kim (1901)

I'll ask each person to read one of the excerpted critical articles at the back of the Norton edition carefully and to be prepared to briefly summarize the argument. (You can all skim other excerpts that look interesting for your own work.)

DUE: One-page proposal for your final research paper

Week 13 Apr 23 Inventing Pre-Post-Colonial Subjectivities

Priya, Joshi. "Culture and Consumption: Fiction, the Reading Public, and the British Novel in Colonial India." Book History 1 (1998): 196-220.

Strongly recommended:

Priya Joshi, In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002 (consider ordering the book on your own--it's excellent)

DUE: Magazine Reports II Reading and Writing India

Note: Professor Priya Joshi will be a guest lecturer this Thursday and Friday. Please plan to attend. Thursday April 24, she will be speaking about India film for the South Asian Studies Program (SASP) at 4:30 in Phillips Hall. Friday April 25 she will be speaking as a guest of the English Department and the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth Century Interdisciplinary Studies Colloquium (ENCIS) at 4:00 in the Gerber Lounge of EPB on the formation of public identities in late Victorian India. EVERYONE should attend, and you're all invited to a party at my house immediately afterward (1157 E. Court St.). I'll also be happy to arrange lunch or some other informal meeting with Priya on Saturday if some of you would like to meet with her to ask her advice about your research projects.

Week 14 Apr 30

Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Short Stories (1890s), Penguin

Week 15 Meet on Saturday May 10 for mini-conference

DUE: Mini-conference: presentation of your research project (first draft)

DUE: Final Papers by Wednesday May 14 at 5:00 in my EPB mailbox