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Extreme States: From Hysteria to Desire

Module description

Extreme States is a module about the self: more specifically, it is about the self subjected to states of extremity, a fascination for literature in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Why did writers of the era return repeatedly to hyperbolic figures like trauma, alienation and incest? And how did these experiences relate to the legacy of the serene rational cogito bequeathed by the Enlightenment? This module looks at a range of genres (poetry, essay, novel) in historical, philosophical/theoretical and formal terms to explore this reconsideration of identity and subjectivity under the rubric of the extreme.

Module aims - intentions of the module

This module aims to think about the types of experience and selfhood explored through the persistent motif of extremity. You will have to the opportunity to understand and contextualise a variety of ‘extreme states’, ranging from paranoia and suicide, to abuse and desire, interpreting them through appropriate critical frameworks such as phenomenological criticism, historicism and feminism. The motif of ‘extreme states’ also engages broader understandings of ‘Romanticism’ as an aesthetics of the limit, and an important part of the module will be to gain an understanding of the Romantic era, its literature and recent critical approaches deployed in Romanticist scholarship. The chronological span of the module, however, covers both the conventional ‘Romantic’ dates of the 1790s to the 1820s, but also encourages you to think about the echoes and after-effects of Romanticism in later writers.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

ILO: Module-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 1. Demonstrate informed appreciation of the nature, history and function of extreme psychological states as a literary theme.
• 2. Demonstrate informed appreciation of Romantic literature as a school, including its determining historical contexts and its later Victorian legacies.
• 3. Demonstrate an understanding of, and an advanced ability to engage with, relevant critical approaches to Romanticism and Victorian literature.

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 4. Demonstrate an advanced ability to analyse literature centring on self and to relate its concerns and modes of expression to its historical context
• 5. Demonstrate an advanced ability to interrelate texts and discourses with issues in the wider context of cultural and intellectual history
• 6. Demonstrate an advanced ability to understand and analyse relevant theoretical ideas, and to apply these ideas to literary texts

ILO: Personal and key skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 7. Demonstrate advanced communication skills, and an ability to work both individually and in groups, through seminar work
• 8. Demonstrate appropriate research and bibliographic skills, an advanced capacity to construct a coherent, substantiated argument, and a capacity to write clear and correct prose, through essay-writing
• 9. Advanced proficiency in information retrieval and analysis, through research for seminars, use of digital archives, annotated bibliographies, and essays
• 10. Through research, seminar discussion, and essay writing demonstrate an advanced capacity to question assumptions, to distinguish between fact and opinion, and to critically reflect on your own learning process.

Syllabus plan

Whilst the content may vary from year to year, it is envisioned that it will cover some or all of the following topics:

• Hysteria (Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary and The Wrongs of Woman )
• Suicide (nineteenth-century Sappho poems)
• Drugs (Thomas De Quincey and Charles Baudelaire)
• Trauma (Lord Byron and Tennyson)
• Incest (P.B. Shelley, The Cenci )
• Apocalypse (Mary Shelley, The Last Man ).
• Illness and the Poetics of Consumption (various)
• Abuse (Anne Bronte, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall )
• Joy (Hopkins and Rossetti)
• Love/Hate (D.H. Lawrence)

Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

Formative assessment

Summative assessment (% of credit)

Details of summative assessment

Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)

Re-assessment notes

If you are unable to complete the viva voce assessment during the standard assessment cycle, you will be asked to complete a 1000 word essay in its place during the reassessment period (details to be set with the convenor).

Deferral – if you miss an assessment for certificated reasons judged acceptable by the Mitigation Committee, you will normally be either deferred in the assessment or an extension may be granted. The mark given for a re-assessment taken as a result of deferral will not be capped and will be treated as it would be if it were your first attempt at the assessment.

Referral – if you have failed the module overall (i.e. a final overall module mark of less than 40%) you will be required to submit a further assessment as necessary. If you are successful on referral, your overall module mark will be capped at 40%.

Indicative learning resources - Basic reading

You should purchase:

• Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary and The Wrongs of Woman
• Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821 version)
• Mary Shelley, The Last Man
• Anne Bronte, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Other readings will be provided on ELE

Selected further reading:

• Thomas Brennan , Trauma, Transcendence and Trust: Wordsworth, Tennyson and Eliot Thinking Loss
• Carmen Casaliggi and Paul March Russell (eds.), Legacies of Romanticism: Literature, Culture, Aesthetics
• Timothy Clark, The Theory of Inspiration: Composition as a Crisis of Subjectivity in Romantic and Post-Romantic Writing
• Joel Faflak and Richard C. Sha (eds.), Romanticism and the Emotions
• Andrea Henderson, Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity, 1740-1830
• Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen
• Thomas Pfau, Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma and Melancholy, 1790-1840
• Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity
• Richard Sha, Perverse Romanticism: Aesthetics and Sexuality in Britain, 1750-1832

Indicative learning resources - Web based and electronic resources

• JSTOR
• Project Muse
• ELE page: https://vle.exeter.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=6908

Key words search

Literature, romanticism, Victorian