Friday, October 1, 2010

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?)

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