What happens when digital tools meet literature? What can the “digital turn” in literary studies help us to understand about stories, history, language, aesthetics, form, cultural networks, adaptation, rhetoric, and the transmission of the written word?
This course will wrestle with these questions in three ways. First, we’ll focus on literary texts produced by nineteenth-century Londoners who attempt to represent their monstrous city—a terrifying and wonderful space that grew too large too fast. We’ll look particularly at writing that addresses the horrors of poverty, the movement of time in a modern world, and the significance of place and community in the new urban sphere. Second, we’ll use digital tools to help us address questions about space, time, and perspective in the works we study. And third, we’ll study the successes, failures, and challenges of digital culture’s efforts to shape our understanding and engagement with literature. In these ways, this course focuses on both digital culture as an object of analysis and as a methodology for the study of nineteenth-century literature. Along the way, you’ll have a chance to build digital projects of your own, including a blog, digital maps, timelines, annotations, and a crowd-sourced public humanities project. The combination of studying literature and creating projects with digital tools will help us to think about the intersection of digital culture and literary studies.
This course counts for Lower-Division Elective credit in Major I & II
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