Tuesday's (26 Oct.) presentations

There is a slight change. We will begin with Kipling's 'Mark of the Beast' (short story placed in Sai Xerox)by Siva and Hassan and then continue and finish the Jekyll and Hyde presentations.

Thursday's class in Room No. 3

The class on Thursday 21 Oct. will be held in Room No. 3 of the New Academic Block.
Pass on the information to classmates.

Presenters of the Hacking texts and Davis' Enforcing Normalcy

Mad Travelers
1) Monica and Smriti
2) Sheeba and Paaban
3) Naina and Deepti

Rewriting the Soul
1) Jagriti and Aswathy
2) Dona and Jomita

Enforcing Normalcy by Lennard Davis
Hoinekip and Chand Basha

No Class on 19 October 2010 (Tuesday)

In view of the student protest against fee hike, the MFMW class remains cancelled tomorrow.
Please be advised that we will discuss Middlemarch on Thursday (21st Oct.) and have all the Jekyll and Hyde as well as Father Damien discussions next week, on Tuesday (26th Oct) and Thursday (28th Oct.).
The rest of the schedule posted on this blog earlier will stand.

Please inform others who may not check the blog.
All the best with the strike!

SCHEDULE FOR THE REST OF THE COURSE

October
19th - MIDDLEMARCH (Class Discussion)
21st - Dr. JEKYLL and Mr.HYDE (Student Presentations)
26th - Dr. JEKYLL and Mr.HYDE (Class Discussion)
28th - FATHER DAMIEN and Kipling's short story 'The Mark of the Beast (Student Presentations)

November
2nd - Hacking presentations (both Mad Travelers and Rewriting the Soul)
4th - Freud presentations and discussion
9th - The Picture of Dorian Gray (Student Presentations)
11th - The Picture of Dorian Gray (Discussion)
16th - Lennard Davis's Enforcing Normalcy (Student Presentations)
Summing up discussion

Digital Libraries and Archives

National Library of Scotland

(http://www.nls.uk/digitallibrary/index.html)

archive.org

(http://www.archive.org/index.php)

Other paper ideas:
- Charles Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (may lend new insights to the discussions on physiognomy we've been having)

- Other writings/ texts by the authors we've examined in the course

- Philosophers of the time?

- Colonial writers and travelers writing about caste, race and tribes in different parts of the world?

Classes this week

Classes this week will be held in Room No. 3 on the first floor.
On Tuesday we will discuss Margrit Shildrick's 'Embodying the Monster' (select chapters in Sai Xerox) and on Thursday we will have the student presentations on Darwin's 'Origin of Species'.

A few thoughts about the End-of-term Paper OR Think outside the literature box!

- Don't feel restricted by traditional notions of 'literature'. Look for pamphlets that were written in the Nineteenth Century; what were the uses of pamphlets - keep in mind that we will soon be reading Stevenson's 'Father Damien'; manuals? posters? advertisements? paintings?
- Vincent van Gogh anyone? - his paintings and his letters to his brother Theo (collected in a volume called 'Dear Theo') "The light that burns within me is dark." van Gogh
- Examine the Victorian poets and their work - Tennyson's obsession with the sea? Browning's dramatic monologues are full of 'abnormal' people.
- Theories of fear: think of the relationship between deformity and fear and its constant invocation within the literature of the period
- What about mad men? Find and examine literary stereotypes of 'madness' in male characters. Perhaps a paper on madness and masculinity?
- Portraits and stereotypes of the 'orient' and 'colonies' as abnormal. Look at this website www.archive.org and read archival material that documents travels to the colonies and the volumes produced about 'other' peoples.
- Does Karl Marx have a theory of the abnormal we have overlooked? Capitalism and the production of obsessive hoarders, perhaps?
- Controversial medical techniques and newspaper articles as well as pamphlets about them in Europe: blood-letting, vaccination, use of opium as medical treatment?
- Sir Francis Galton
- Tiny Tim?
- A survey of the different kinds of institutions in Dickens' novels - poor house, orphanage, hospital, asylum.
- Childhood and abnormality
- Europe's anti-semitism and the production of the 'religious abnormal' or the 'abnormally religious' - doctrinal religions (the norm?) and ritualistic practices (the deviation as well as the deviant?)