Month: September 2019

Clarissa, Week 3 (410-883): Abduction to Rape

Excellent work, everyone.  As we approach the next 400 pages of Clarissa this week, I’m going to focus the assignment squarely on the thematic clusters.

This week, while you are reading, please pick one of the thematic clusters:

A.  Love, Sexuality, Property

B.  Class, Rank, Legitimacy

C.  Morality, Sensibility, Indifference

D.  Happiness and/or Pleasure

While you are reading, trace this particular cluster across the next 400 pages, so that you’ve developed a small group of passages that you can comment upon in your reflection for this segment.  You don’t need to quote extensively from the passages, but do list the letter/page numbers so that others can retrieve them.  Reflections should be about a paragraph or so.  Thanks, and good luck.

DM

(Still Missing: Maillet, Robinson)

Clarissa, Week 2 (148-410): Arguments & Abduction

As promised, I’m posting a link here to Sade’s Essay on the Novel, which should help you see the connections between the morally polarized readings of Clarissa that came from Richardson’s feminist and anti-feminist readers and imitators. I’m also including two pioneering female critics (Van Ghent and Doody) to give you a sense of Richardson’s form and generic positioning.

For your reading journals this week, I’d like you to keep tabs on your experiences of the unfolding plot, your sense of the characters and their physical environment while you write. This coming week we’ll be sharing some portion of your journals with one another, so be sure to decide which portions you’d like to share. I also ask for you to keep a running tab of passages you’d like to discuss. In these journals, you are free to incorporate or ignore insights or passages from Sade, Van Ghent, or Doody, and to explicitly address questions such as:

  • morality, sensibility, pleasure, pain, indifference
  • visuality, transparency, the gaze
  • power, conflict, tragedy

Let me know if you run into any problems. Otherwise, I’ll see you this Thursday.

Take care,

DM

Clarissa, Week 1 (Preface, Letters 1-31, pp. 1-148): UPDATED

Hi folks,

Thanks for a great seminar on Thursday. As I mentioned in class, we’ll begin slowly with Clarissa and then speed up as we go along.

In class Thursday, we’ll read as a group the Preface, including the Principal Characters (35-8), then the first 31 letters, and conclude with the first letter of Lovelace to Belford (142-8).

For your first blog comment, I’d like you to mine your reading journals to talk about the transition from amatory fiction (Bowers) to a more circumstantial realist presentation (Watt) in SR. You might also want to think about the extent that SR might want us to recognize Clarissa’s characterization as potentially offering a ““reform’d coquet” (Spencer) style narrative (with other characters perceiving her this way) and then showing this reading of her to be wrong.

Hit the comment button on the left hand column (or the “leave a reply” box) and discuss what you noticed in the transition in a paragraph or so, along with some textual evidence taken from the texts you discuss. You are free to use the Bowers, Watt, or Spencer selections, or not, in your responses below.

Good luck,

DM

UPDATE: Please have these posted by Wednesday evening, so we can all read and review them before classtime. Thanks, DM