Course Syllabus

Course Syllabus & Information

Reading Schedule

Following this schedule will keep you technically abreast of lecture. The advisable reading schedule is, as always, to have each text read in full before the first lecture upon it.

Week 1: Charles Darwin: Selected Passages (Handout.)
Week 2: Sir Walter Scot, Rob Roy
Week 3: Sir Walter Scot, Rob Roy
Week 4: George McDonald, Princess & Curdie
Week 5: George McDonald, Princess & Curdie
Week 6: George Eliot, Mill on the Floss
Week 7: George Eliot, Mill on the Floss
Week 8: Charles Dickens, Mystery of Edwin Drood
Week 9: Charles Dickens, Mystery of Edwin Drood
Week 10: Charles Kingsley, Water Babies
Week 11: Charles Kingsley, Water Babies
Week 12: Marie Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan
Week 13: Marie Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan

The two recommended texts are A.N. Wilson, God's Funeral and Buckler, William (ed.) Prose of the Victorian Period. They are recommended for several reasons. I would say primarily because, I am convinced, they are indispensable features of each English scholar's library: permanent furniture that will be perennially beneficial. God's Funeral is a delight and an education: the style and the personal details captivate while the dialectic informs the sweep of the intellectual nineteenth century clear ringingly in your mind. Prose of the Victorian Period is a trove of hard, gem-like prosaic art that shows the living mind of the century: and that a life which shows our century how writing can -- even, how should -- be done. Of course, more immediately, they form the ideational basis of course lectures.

Schedule of Assignment Due Dates:
Assignment details in "Pertinent & Impertinent" Links.
Update: Assignment Deadlines.
Nb: There is a four percent per day late penalty for all assignments, documented medical or bereavement leave excepted. For medical exemptions, provide a letter from a physician on letterhead which declares his or her medical judgement that illness or injury prevented work on the essay. The letter must cover the entire period over which the assignment was scheduled and may be verified by telephone. For any matter effecting deadlines, consult with the TA in person and before the assignment period.

May 18th: Draught of Individual Writing Presentation.
May 25th: Mid-Term essay topics posted.
June 8th: Draught Mid-Term essay due.
June 15th: Group Polemical Project, members assigned.
Individual Writing Presentation peer analysis.
June 25th: Graded Mid-Term draught returned.
July 9th: Revised Mid-Term essay due.
July 13th: Group Polemic Project: peer review.
July 23rd: Graded Mid-Term revision returned.
July 27th: Revised Individual Writing Presentation due.
August 3rd: Group Polemical Project due.
August 13th: Final Essay Due.

Support material available on Library Reserve.

Nb: “Participation requires both participation and punctuality ."

Instructor Contact:
Office Hours: AQ 6094 -- Monday & Wednesday 10:30-3:00. Bring your coffee and discuss course matters freely. E-mail to ogden@sfu.ca Please only use your SFU account for e-mail contact. Other e-Mail accounts are blocked by white-list.

Course Approach:

From the direction of the engagement with God. "God's Funeral" is the result of the materialism which produced, and was then strengthened by, Darwinism and Urban Industrialism (each of the pair then strengthening the other; and is then the cause of search for Resurrection: that is, a literary search for a revivified humanism. Giving shape to this is the perhaps paradoxical, perhaps merely natural, double-sided obsession, century long, with both progress and decadence.