Course for international guest/part time students
- Faculty
- Faculty of Humanities
- Organization
- BTK Department of English Studies
- Code
- BBI-ANG22-225E.10
- Title
- Reading Culture: Interdisciplinary Approaches: Way of life and ethnicity: Relating to people on the move in English narratives 1800-2000
- Usual semester
- Both
- ECTS
- 3
- Language
- en
- Learning outcomes
- The aim of this course is to present students with an array of literary and academic texts that help us access the imagined Gypsy and vagrant through two centuries of English writing and television. As these figures are in a marginalised position, their imagined identity – or, as they are depicted by authors of the majority society – is ever-changing and at the service of those within the margins of society. Their presence may lend instability, uncertainty to a narrative landscape, and may carry any meaning the author likes, making them a uniquely versatile (and almost interchangeable) vessel for Western imagination. This interchangeability as well as the elements of ethnicity and way of life will be the focus of this course: this is the lens through which the primary texts and media will be observed.
- Course content
- Most of the primary texts studied in this course are not part of the regular English literary canon, as the likes of Sherlock Holmes, Dracula or Agatha Christie mysteries are often considered pulp fiction and thus not a part of high culture worth studying. However, as these texts are valuable memoranda of socio-cultural and historical tendencies, they are worth analysing in our quest to understand the ’Western imagination’, how trends like Orientalism shape how Brits saw domestic Others, and how these figures contribute to the examined narratives. For this, we will also consider ethnographic texts from the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as legal documents and the progression of the Vagrancy Act. This course considers about two centuries in order to juxtapose the differences and similarities in depictions of people on the move, but there is no final goal to be reached: by the end of the semester, students should be able to master some key frameworks and analyse works from the Romantic, the early Victorian, mid-Victorian and late Victorian eras, as well as crime fiction in the 20th century. In addition, some classes will be dedicated to theories of critical media analysis so that students can examine films and series alongside traditional texts. Throughout the semester, terms like ‘tramp drag’ and ‘domestic Other’ will be crucial, as well as the notion of the ‘relocalisation of the delocalised Other’. We will also see that the need to define a certain group is part of our pseudo-empirical approach to the narratives and what they depict, a decidedly Victorian notion that can be connected to Orientalism. At the end of the day, it is the Western imagination that we are interacting with and interrogating; our aim is not to define or find out what a vagrant is, what Gypsies are, rather how they are depicted and why their presence is important for the narratives examined in class.
- Assessment method
- Fundamentally, the evaluation of this course is based on the work seen in class: the basis of a student’s grade depends on how active they are in each session. Additionally, each student is required to read and analyse the texts assigned in preparation for each week’s class. Students are expected to be active and engaged in the discussions, meaning they should have at least one question or comment that contributes to the class each week. Their preparedness will also be tested with the help of the Kahoot! app in most classes, but as the game is anonymous, their performance has no bearing on their grades. Naturally, students may write an essay (four pages max.) to be submitted by Tuesday midnight the week before last; this option is open to anyone, but it is particularly aimed at those who do not actively participate in class or are often absent so that they may improve their grade.
- Bibliography
- All literature, including secondary texts, will be sent to the students well before the second class; alterations to the syllabus will be possible upon request in the first class. Primary texts (originals): William Wordsworth: Gipsies William Wordsworth: The Female Vagrant William Wordsworth: The Old Cumberland Beggar Matthew Arnold: The Scholar Gipsy George Borrow: Romany Rye [excerpts] Bram Stoker: Dracula [excerpts] Arthur Conan Doyle: The Adventure of the Speckled Band Arthur Conan Doyle: The Hound of the Baskervilles [excerpts] Arthur Conan Doyle: The Priory School [excerpts] Arthur Conan Doyle: The Silver Blaze [excerpts] D.H. Lawrence: The Virgin and the Gypsy Virginia Woolf: Orlando Films and film series (adaptations) [clips]: Agatha Christie: The Adventure of Johnnie Waverley Agatha Christie: The King of Clubs Agatha Christie: The Kidnapped Prime Minister Agatha Christie: Murder on the Links Arthur Conan Doyle: The Norwood Builder Arthur Conan Doyle: The Crooked Man Midsomer Murders S2E4 Blood Will Out Midsomer Murders S3E1 Death of a Stranger Midsomer Murders S7E1 The Green Man Midsomer Murders S8E5 Second Sight Midsomer Murders S8E8 Midsomer Rhapsody Midsomer Murders S13E3 Blood on the Saddle Secondary texts [excerpts]: Arata, Steven D. “The Occidental Tourist: ‘Dracula’ and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization”. Victorian Studies 33 (Summer 1990): 621-645. Bardi, Abby. “’Labours of Their Own’: Property, Blood, and the Szgany in Dracula”. Bram Stoker and the Gothic: Formations to Transformations, edited by Catherine Wynne, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 78-92. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso Books, 2004. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish, translated by Alan Sheridan, New York: Vintage,1995. URL: https://monoskop.org/images/4/43/Foucault_Michel_Discipline_and_Punish_Th e_Birth_of_the_Prison_1977_1995.pdf Friedman, Geraldine. “History in the Background of Wordsworth’s ‘Blind Beggar’”. ELH, vol. 56, no. 1, 1989, pp. 125-148. URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2873126 Groome, Francias Hindes. “The Vampire: A Roumanian Gypsy Story”. Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, vol. 2, no. 3, 1890, pp. 142-148. Hitchcock, Tim. “Begging on the Streets of Eighteenth-Century London”. Journal of British Studies, vol. 44, no. 3, 2005, pp. 478-498. URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/429704 Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford UP, 2007. King, Joshua. “’The Old Cumberland Beggar: Form and Frustrated Sympathy’”. The Wordsworth Circle, vol. 41, no. 1, 2010, pp. 45-52. URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24043687 Ladányi, János, and Szelényi, Iván. “Ki a cigány?”. Kritika, no. 12, 1997, pp. 3-6. URL: https://adatbank.ro/html/cim_pdf443.pdf Mayall, David. Gypsy-travellers in Nineteenth-century Society. Cambridge UP, 1988. Mercer, Christia. “Chapter Four: Seventeenth-Century Universal Sympathy.” Sympathy: A History, edited by Eric Schliesser, Oxford UP, 2015, pp. 107–145. Radnóti, Sándor. A táj keletkezéstörténetei: “Ők, akik nézték Hannibál hadát”. Budapest, Atlantisz, 2022. Robinson, Alistair. Vagrancy in the Victorian Age: Representing the Wandering Poor in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Cambridge UP, 2022. Sayre-McCord, Geoffrey. “Chapter Seven: Hume and Smith on Sympathy, Approbation, and Moral Judgment.” Sympathy: A History, edited by Eric Schliesser, Oxford UP, 2015, pp. 208–253. Smith, George of Coalville. Gipsy Life: Being an Account of Our Gipsies and Their Children. London, Haughton, 1880. URL: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/28548/28548-h/28548-h.htm Trumpener, Katie. “The Time of the Gypsies: A ‘People without History’ in the Narratives of the West”. Critical Inquiry, vol. 18, no. 4, 1992, pp. 843-884. Said, Edward. Orientalism. 1978. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2003. Selling, Jan. “Assessing the Historical Irresponsibility of the Gypsy Lore Society in Light of Romani Subaltern Challenges”. Critical Romani Studies 1 (2018): 44-61. Spencer, Kathleen L. “Purity and Danger: Dracula, the Urban Gothic, and the Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis”. ELH 59 (Spring 1992): 197-225. Tchaprazov, Stoyan. “The Slovaks and Gypsies of Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Vampires in Human Flesh.” English Literature in Transition 58 (2015): 523-535. Wlislocki, Heinrich Von. “The Witches of the Gypsies.” Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society 3 (July 1981): 38-45. Additional sources: Vagrant Laws, Volume 6 , debated on Tuesday 12 March 1822: https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1822-03-12/debates/0aa6bd64-8b22-4b44-894e-3e3d8c15ab84/VagrantLaws Vagrancy Act 1824: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo4/5/83 Vagrancy Act 1935: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo5/25-26/20/contents Some context and the Old Poor Law: https://read.uolpress.co.uk/read/providing-for-the-poor/section/1eea98bc-5b2f-432f-b916-2528f946dc65#_idTextAnchor1670 The Vagrancy Act and today’s homeless: “Scrap the Vagrancy Act”, Crisis UK Website, URL: https://www.crisis.org.uk/get-involved/campaign/scrap-the-vagrancy-act/ Statute 1530: 22 Henry VIII c. 10: An act concerning outlandish people, calling themselves Egyptians: https://statutes.org.uk/site/the-statutes/sixteenth-century/1530-22-henry-8-c-10-the-egyptians-act/