Course title: Pre-Raphaelitism
Instructor: Professor Tatjana Jukić
ECTS credits: 6
Language: English
Semester: 1 or 3
Enrollment requirements: Enrollment in the graduate programme
Course description: The course explores how literature intersects with visuality in Victorian culture, with the emphasis on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Taking Foucault’s discussions of the nineteenth century as our point of departure, we will analyze how the Pre-Raphaelites engage the contact zones of literature and the visual, and anticipate critical and visual developments that we associate with the twentieth century. We will focus on art, poetry and/or criticism by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, John Ruskin, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt.
Course requirements: The grade is based on a written essay at the end of term (30% of the final grade), and two tests (30% of the final grade each), as well as on active participation in the class (10% of the final grade).
WEEK 1 Visuality and Victorian culture. Panopticism. Painting and photography.
WEEK 2 Michel Foucault and the Victorians. Visuality and sexuality. Historicism and the second law of thermodynamics.
WEEK 3 The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Visuality, narration, historicism.
WEEK 4 The Pre-Raphaelite Shakespeare (1). Hamlet. John Everett Millais, „Ophelia“
WEEK 5 The Pre-Raphaelite Shakespeare (2). Measure for Measure. Millais and William Holman Hunt. Alfred Tennyson, „Mariana“
WEEK 6 The Pre-Raphaelites and psychoanalysis (1). Dante Gabriel Rossetti, „Ecce Ancilla Domini (The Annunciation)“
WEEK 7 The Pre-Raphaelites and psychoanalysis (2). Dante Gabriel Rossetti, „Pia de’ Tolomei“ and „Proserpine.“ Dante Gabriel Rossetti on the sonnet. Sigmund Freud, „Mourning and Melancholia“
WEEK 8 Midterm. Rossetti as translator. Translation as the „insanity of realism“ (Walter Pater)
WEEK 9 Women and the Brotherhood. Victorian women writers. Christina Rossetti (1). „In an Artist’s Studio,“ „My Dream,“ „The Convent Threshold“
WEEK 10 Women and the Brotherhood. Victorian women writers. Christina Rossetti (2). Goblin Market
WEEK 11 The Pre-Raphaelites, political economy and biopolitics. Ford Madox Brown, „Work.“ John Ruskin as critic.
WEEK 12 Croatian critics on Pre-Raphaelitism. Antun Gustav Matoš and Miroslav Krleža.
WEEK 13 The Pre-Raphaelites and (post)modernity. John Fowles and A. S. Byatt.
WEEK 14 Final discussion.
WEEK 15 Final test. Evaluation.
Required reading:
Dickens, Charles. “A Criticism of Millais’ ‘Christ in the House of His Parents’”
Hunt, William Holman. Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (selection)
Rossetti, Christina Rossetti. Stories and poetry (selection)
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Poetry, translations, criticism (selection)
Ruskin, John. Criticism (selection)
Pater, Walter. “Dante Gabriel Rossetti”
Swinburne, Algernon Charles. Poetry (selection)
Tennyson, Alfred. Poetry (selection)
Byatt, Antonia Susan. Possession. A Romance
Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant’s Woman
Optional reading:
Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator”
Bronfen, Elizabeth. Over Her Dead Body. Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (selection)
Buchanan, Robert. “The Fleshly School of Poetry”
Cavell, Stanley. Contesting Tears. The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (selection)
Deleuze, Gilles. Essays Critical and Clinical (selection)
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (selection)
Foucault, Michel. „Of Other Spaces“
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: 1. (selection)
Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia”
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (selection)
Harding, Ellen (ed.). Re-Framing the Pre-Raphaelites. Historical and Theoretical Essays (selection)
James, Henry. Letters (selection)
Jukić, Tatjana. Zazor, nadzor, sviđanje. Dodiri književnog i vizualnog u britanskom 19. stoljeću (selection)
Klibansky, Raymond, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl. Saturn and Melancholy. Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (selection)
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”
Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae. Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (selection)
Pointon, Marcia (ed.). Pre-Raphaelites Re-Viewed (selection)
Pollock, Griselda. Vision and Difference. Femininity, feminism and histories of art (selection)
Rancière, Jacques. The Future of the Image (selection)
Tobin, Thomas (ed.). Worldwide Pre-Raphaelitism (selection)