“The Last Victorian Novel:” Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure
LIT12-5a-Mon1
Iana Seerung
This course will take place virtually on Zoom. Participation in this course requires a device (ideally a computer or tablet, rather than a cell phone) with a camera and microphone in good working order and basic familiarity with using Zoom and accessing email.
September 9 - October 7
The scholar Jahan Ramanzi refers to Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure as “the last Victorian and the first modern” novel. While Hardy’s work is still recognizable among the conventions of the Victorian novel, Jude represents a significant shift toward abstraction and figurative meaning, heralding the turn toward literary modernism. Due to the immense public backlash and criticism of the novel at the time, Jude is also Hardy’s last novel, turning him toward poetry for the remainder of his literary career. This class proposes a careful reading of Jude as both a retrospective on the Victorian novel and a proto-modernist text. We will explore how Jude both inhabits and exceeds the realist tradition which defined the Victorian era, tracing, along the way, major scientific, political, and economic upheavals which defined the late-Victorian period and altered the shape of the novel form.
We will also take seriously this theme of finality as it emerges in the novel itself and how we make sense of the novel historically. Our discussions will mainly consist of close reading of Jude, paying attention to abstraction in the text as we collectively develop an aesthetic vocabulary. This course will be of interest to students who are passionate about the Victorian period, the novel form, and the turn to literary modernism, as well as those who are generally interested in great literature and looking to discover Thomas Hardy for the first time.
More facilitated discussion than lecture.
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (any edition). Additional materials (several poems and one short story) will be provided by email.
Reading load is approximately 90 pages per week.
Iana Seerung is a PhD student in English at Brandeis University. Their work is in Victorian literature with a focus in new formalism, political economy, and philosophy and literature. Their current research aims to rethink the political investments of naturalism as a genre, reading the foreclosed social worlds of writers such as Thomas Hardy and Emile Zola not as representations of the world as it is currently, but as projections of certain ideological formations of the world, such as liberalism, that reveal their true character when put into the novel form.