English 90pp. Plotting the Passions: Nineteenth-Century Literature and Modern Love

Instructor: Victoria Wiet
Tuesdays, 9:45-11:45 am | Location: Barker 269

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Enrollment: Limited to 15 students

On the series finale of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, the flawed but lovable protagonist comes to a realization when she sings, “life doesn’t make narrative sense.” Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is one among many contemporary television shows that meditate on how literature, theatre and film have created expectations about romantic and sexual life in ways that are both invigorating and restricting. This course explores how those expectations have been established, revised and reflected upon since the consolidation of the marriage plot in the early nineteenth century. How does intimacy develop?  What are the aims of romantic and sexual life? How does sexual passion affect personal identity, and how do social norms affect sexual passion? We will consider how plot combines with other narrative elements such as description, characterization, and point-of-view in order to convey perspectives on the preceding questions. Through formal analysis, we will come to a deeper appreciation of how narrative works convey changing beliefs about love and sex and what beliefs have remained the same despite the seismic historical changes that have intervened between Jane Austen’s Emma and Sharon Horgan’s comedic series, Catastrophe.

            The first two units study the development and consolidation of two important narrative conventions: the marriage plot and the sexual tragedy. During these units, we will consider how these conventions emerged out of a distinctive historical context, the consolidation of the inviolate reproductive nuclear family, while also asking how and why they have endured. In the next unit, we will meditate on how the narrative and social expectations laid out in the nineteenth-century took on altered yet recognizable forms in the new media characteristic of the twentieth century: cinema, the pulp novel, and the modern theatre. We will conclude by reading a contemporary novel that puts enduring narrative conventions in service of formal experimentation, Sally Rooney’s Normal People. Other works studied include Emma; Jane Eyre; Madame Bovary; Jude the Obscure;  The Picture of Dorian Gray; the films It Happened One Night and Now Voyager; the plays A Streetcar Named Desire and A Taste of Honey; and the lesbian pulp The Price of Salt and its 2015 film adaptation, Carol.