Housekeeping
- After spring break: Blog #3 due by midnight 3/9 (you’ll need at least 5 days of prep work before you can write it. I’d suggest getting it out of the way this week so you can enjoy the break!)
- Grades back on Project 1 by 3/2 or sooner (via BB).
- We won’t read all of Pamela–I’ll update the schedule shortly this afternoon with guidance on what to read
Discussion
Let’s read the preface to the second edition and think a bit about framing and reception…
#quotables: find a section of the text you’re interested in discussing and ask us a critical (i.e. analytical) or contextual (i.e. historical) question about it. I’ll call on you at random!
Gothic as an inherently political form, arising when the traditional authority of church and state are being challenged by the Enlightenment and the revolutions in North America and France. As a repository for anxieties that arise from this cultural shift. Link between Gothic and the Reign of Terror and its aftermath.
Edmund Burke, On the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) :
The beautiful, according to Burke, is what is well formed and aesthetically pleasing, whereas the sublime is what has the power to compel and overwhelm us. Formal gardens are beautiful, but the wilderness is sublime. “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”“Indeed, terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently, the ruling principle of the sublime.”
- We find out that Manfred and Isabella are descended from the great Alfonso. How does this relate to the ghost/supernatural activity?
- How does this novel depict love and romance?
- How does this novel depict foreign Others?
- What is the role of fate and the spiritual world in the novel?
- How does this novel handle male sexual desire?
- Does Walpole seem to be making some argument about fathers here? And what about inheritance (both of goods/places and of behaviors)?
