124221 SE Cultural and Media Studies Seminar (2023W)

The Victorians are said to have been fascinated by things: they invented window shopping as a leisure activity, they collected bric-a-brac on their mantelpieces, and they displayed objects, often shipped from colonies, in galleries and museums. The reasons for this preoccupation with materiality are manifold. The nineteenth century did not only see the heyday of the British colonial expansion but also the advent of mass production and the rise of the consumer society. Formerly reserved for the elite, commodities such as silk and print publications became widely available for the aspirational middle class and partly for the working class. The flipside of the material opulence, it appears, are the squalid living and work conditions of the poor, industrial pollution, and the exploitation of the natural resources in GB and the colonies.

In this seminar, we will investigate the Victorians' complex and sometimes uneasy relationship with materiality as reflected in different media. Besides investigating the meanings of things in the context of property and consumption, we might also look into the scientific and technological developments (e.g. Darwin's theory of evolution) enabling new relationships with materiality and destabilizing the dichotomy between the human and non-human matter, between subject and object: When do people appear thing-like or inanimate and when are objects attributed with agency and aliveness? Apart from literary texts published in different formats (periodicals, novels, poems), we will have a look at photography, pamphlets, and advertisements.

Aimed at MA students and advanced BA students, the objective of this course is to develop students' theoretical and methodological competences in order to conduct independent academic work. Furthermore, the course is intended to develop the students' ability to present the results of their research in oral and written form.

CMS SE Theorizing Victorian Material Cultures is an in-person course with synchronous and asynchronous elements as well as some digital sessions. Methods include group discussions, group and independent work, and various smaller tasks. Please be aware that this is a theory-heavy course.