Download Charles Dickens

Sophister Option Description Template 2017-18
Option Name: CHARLES DICKENS
Option Short Title: DICKENS
Lecturer Name and Email Address: Daragh Downes [email protected]
ECTS Weighting: 10
Semester/Term Taught: HT
Option Learning Aims:
Charles Dickens (a.k.a. The Inimitable) was the paramount man of letters of the Victorian era. Our
ambition in this seminar will be to account for Dickens as a man of his time while also doing some
justice to the sheer idiosyncrasy of his contribution to the canon of English fiction. The texts we look
at will prompt us again and again to explore the truly weird grammar of Dickens’s comedic, pathetic
and gothic imagination.
Learning Outcomes:
On successful completion of this course a student should be able to:
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demonstrate a strong familiarity with a broad range of primary texts by Dickens;
trace Dickens’s evolution as a writer across the several identifiable phases of his career;
analyse the role played by serial publication in the shaping of Dickens’s fiction;
place Dickens and his fictions in the historical, social and literary context of early-to-midVictorian Britain;
apply to specific Dickens texts strategies of stylistic, rhetorical and narratological close
reading;
give account of some of the theoretical and critical debates that have dominated the
academic reception of Dickens in recent decades.
Option Content:
Working in chronological order, we will together read a generous mixture of texts comprising:
a) shorter pieces (journalistic and fictional, e.g. A Christmas Carol);
b) excerpts from a range of iconic Dickens novels;
c) three full novels (The Old Curiosity Shop, David Copperfield and Great Expectations).
Assessment Details (Including component percentage(s):
One essay (5-6,000 words) to be submitted by Week 2 of Trinity Term (100%).
You will be free to choose your own assignment topic based on your own selected text (or selection
of texts) from the entire Dickens oeuvre.
Dr. Daragh Downes
[email protected]