Welcome

What function do collections serve? To order the world, to preserve the past, to consolidate self, class, nation? What do they express? Desire, anxiety, a drive to contain, the embrace of chaos? What is the relationship between collector and the objects in her collection? Between observer and observed? Between the material object and its representation in/as art? To answer these questions, this course will take up a wide range of primary text readings, including voyage narratives, scientific reports, literary essays, museum catalogues, and books of poetry, in tandem with recent scholarship on things, materiality, collecting, and aesthetics from the fields of museum studies, book history, science studies, and cultural studies. Through these readings, we’ll consider how things become (or resist becoming) objects by way of their incorporation into systems of representation (whether Linnaean taxonomy, the museum, the catalogue, or the anthology). Throughout the course, we’ll spend time untwisting the arguments critics have made about collecting, and testing their conclusions through detailed analyses of literary works. Most of our case studies will come from the Romantic period, 1780-1830, but we will range across the 19^th and 20^th centuries for additional materials, examples, and scholarly work. You will leave the class having studied a small group of Romantic period writers, including John Clare, William Wordsworth, and John Keats, that are often associated with the turn to materiality in literary studies.

This course is designed to provide students with the theoretical and philosophical grounding in a specific topic—the theory and practice of collecting—and to introduce a set of “portable methodologies” that can be applied across literary periods. I encourage students to follow their own interests for the final project, which will be developed in consultation with me after spring break. 

Please use this forum to post article summaries, reading responses, and your composition/publication/reception history. Reading responses should be uploaded by 3pm on any given Tuesday.