Assignments: Victorian Garbage

PAPER #1

Research Project & Presentation

PAPER #1

Paper #1 is due on FRIDAY, October 1 no later than 1 pm at my office in WAC 112

• Your papers should be 3-4 pages in length

• Format: Papers should be double-spaced with 1-inch margins. They should be headed by a title of your own devising. All quotations from texts should be followed by a parenthetical citation of page number. I encourage you to look at the “writing tip sheet” I have posted on the web if you have further questions: http://beloit.edu/~ketabgia/writing_tips.htm

In his sketches for The Uncommercial Traveller, how does Dickens engage with concepts of garbage posed by a theorist we have read (Douglas, Kristeva, Miller, or Ruskin)?

NOTE: I intend this topic to be a broad ‘prompt’ for more pointed and specific claims that YOU will define, pursue, and winnow down. You are welcome to use insights explored in earlier assignments for this class.

Some points of departure may include:

· Purity and corruption

· Order and disorder

· Disgust and languages of disgust (or identification)

· Spirituality and the sacred

· Ritual and daily practice

· The abject

· Realism and representation (descriptive and/or normative aims)

· Phobia, anxiety, and/or the threat of contamination

· Production and consumption

· Social class

· Gender and/or sexuality

· Race and/or ethnicity

· Death and the corpse

· Anthropology, ethnography, travel, journalism

· “The divinity of decomposition”

FINALLY: Feel free to discuss more than one theorist or to concentrate solely upon one of Dickens’s sketches. If you wish, you may substitute The King of the Golden River or “Goblin Market” for Dickens.