Matt Poland

ENGL 111: The Material Worlds of the Brontë Sisters

2020-05-27T00:00:00-07:00

Terms Taught

Winter 2020

Summary

This composition course was organized around reading Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, which discussions and writing assignments geared toward investigating the physical worlds of the novels and of the students themselves.

Description

We might be forgiven for thinking of literary texts as repositories of disembodied experiences: emotions felt at one remove, only inside our heads. But novels are also archives of experiences in the world, detailed representations of physical environments and affective, imaginative responses to them. Indeed, we often forget that reading itself is an embodied experience in close contact with a book, an object designed to give you particular sensations. In this course, we will use writing as a way to engage with the world, with places and things that connect us to history and each other. We will do so by reading, talking, and writing about two novels: Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, written by sisters Emily and Charlotte Brontë. These books create unusually intense emotional experiences while also acting as conduits for understanding how places and everyday objects – clothes, furniture, mementos, handwriting – connect us through our senses to each other, ourselves, even global history and social issues.

The goal of the course is not that you end up with an encyclopedic knowledge of the Brontës’ writings or material culture (though this is a risk you will have to take). Rather, you will conduct a case study in how literature helps us think critically and intuitively about the world, refine your writing and reading skills, and pick up habits that will help you communicate more effectively in different academic and professional settings. You will be assessed on a self-chosen portfolio consisting of substantially revised versions of your most effective writing from the quarter, and a final critical essay reflecting on your growth toward core learning goals.

Syllabus

NAVSA 2019

2019-03-27T00:00:00-07:00

Victorian Archival Mediations panel

(Conference site)

Panel Participants

Ann Garascia, California State University, San Bernardino: “Gathering Victorian Moss: Archival Care for the Anthropocene”
James Mussell, University of Leeds: “Ephemera Belongs to the Dead: Affect, Print, and the Archive”
Matthew Poland (organizer), University of Washington: “Eliot at Yale: Gordon Haight and the Horizons of Victorian Studies”
Anna Wager, Hobart and William Smith Colleges: “Use and Disuse: Mediated Access and the Liverpool Cathedral Embroideries”

Panel Overview

It is a favorite bedtime story for historians in any discipline: the next time we go into an archive or library is the time we uncover a lost letter or manuscript which changes scholarship forever. It is also a favorite media narrative, recent entries including a “lost” Sylvia Plath story and a “rediscovered” Clara Schumann letter – which were catalogued all along. Trusting that verb, “rediscover,” underlines our complacency in understanding what curators do, but also in underestimating the extent to which institutional practices mediate our objects of study. As the archival theorist Wolfgang Ernst has written, “The power of memory lies less in the past than in its undeceivable storage.”

This panel will present four brief, fifteen-minute forays into Victorian archives. We take up Raymond Williams’ strong sense of the term “mediation”: that it inheres in cultural objects themselves. We examine how apparently objective, or innocuous, acts of storage, naming, and arranging shape scholarly inquiry. Our papers treat archival materials not just as constituents of other histories, but as vectors with trajectories of their own. We have adopted a catholic definition of the term “archive,” inclusive of print and literary forms as well as memory institutions. Our approaches are equally wide-ranging, drawing from literary studies, art history, print history, the history of science, and information theory. The materials under discussion represent the diversity of the Victorians’ continued presence: letters, printed ephemera, embroidery, botanical samples. Further, we offer new ways of thinking about archives as repositories of embodied affects, our subjects’ and our own. Our papers meander beyond the narrow (though intriguing) channels we route our responses into – Derrida’s “archive fever,” Arlette Farge’s “allure of the archives” – to register other sensations: longing, cramp, tedium, loss.

Following the Latourian turn against reflexively responding to institutions with suspicion, we do not stop at interpreting Victorian and early twentieth-century archives as the disciplinary apparatus of oppressive ideology, or merely tracing how those ideologies are reified in curatorial practices. Paranoia is not out of place in these institutions, but it can foreclose other insights. Rather, in the spirit of work by Nathan Hensley and Devin Griffiths, we model curatorial approaches which embrace a politics of care as well as of critique, reimagining these collections as active, generative systems, as new theaters of discovery for Victorian studies.

V21 Summer Reading Group 2018

2018-08-14T00:00:00-07:00

Seattle V21 Collective Reading Group (Sept. 6-7, 2018)

http://v21collective.org/4th-annual-v21-collective-summer-reading-groups/

Th/Fri Sept. 6-7
9am - 3pm (with a break for lunch)
Communications Bldg Room 202 (Simpson Center seminar room)
University of Washington
Contact: Matt Poland (mjpoland [at] uw [dot] edu)

RSVP 2018

2018-07-13T00:00:00-07:00

Presentation Sources

Slides

Chase, Karen, and Michael Levenson. “Green Dickens.” Contemporary Dickens. Ed. Eileen Gillooly and Deirdre David. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2009. 131–151. Print.
Cloud, Random [Randall McLeod]. “FIAT fLUX.” Crisis in Editing: Texts of the English Renaissance. Ed. Randall McLeod. New York: AMS Press, 1993. Print.
Darnton, Robert. “What Is the History of Books?” Daedalus 111.3 (1982): 65–83. Web.
Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend. Pub. 1865. Ed. Adrian Poole. Penguin Classics, 1998. Print.
Dickens, Charles, and Mark Lemon. “A Paper-Mill.” Household Words 1.23 (1850): 529–531. UW Special Collections. Print.
Fyfe, Aileen. Steam-Powered Knowledge: William Chambers and the Business of Publishing, 1820-1860. University of Chicago Press, 2012. Print.
Horne, Richard H. “Dust; Or, Ugliness Redeemed.” Household Words 1 (1850): 379–84. UW Special Collections. Print.
Jameson, Fredric. The Geopolitical Aesthetic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Print.
Mayhew, Henry. The Essential Mayhew: Representing and Communicating the Poor. Ed. Bertrand Taithe. London: Rivers Oram, 1996. Print.
—. London Labour and the London Poor. London: Griffin, Bohn, and Company, 1862. British Library Shelfmark 08276.bb.2. Print.
Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. Verso Books, 2016. Print.
Parikka, Jussi. The Anthrobscene. University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Print.
Price, Leah. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain. Princeton University Press, 2012. Print.
Sutherland, John Andrew. Victorian Novelists and Publishers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Print.
Taylor, Jesse Oak. The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf. University of Virginia Press, 2016. Print.

N.B: images from Our Mutual Friend were taken from UVic’s Victorian Serial Novels collection. Thanks to UVic Special Collections for their physical and digital help with this presentation.

ENGL 131: The Rhetoric of Digital Media

2018-06-28T00:00:00-07:00

Terms Taught

Autumn 2015, Winter 2016, Spring 2016, Autumn 2016, Winter 2017, Spring 2017

Summary

This composition course was structured by the four learning outcomes set by the UW Expository Writing Program, which I interpreted as Writing Choices, Research, Argumentation, and Revision. The themes varied over the six quarters I taught this course, including a last-minute inclusion of a unit on “fake news” anchored by Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” after the 2016 election. But, mainly, course readings and discussions focused on the utility of information technology in education and day-to-day life.

Description

George Orwell wrote, “Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits…which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble.” So what are these “bad habits” and, more importantly, what is involved in taking the “necessary trouble” to address them?

One of these “bad habits” is to treat writing as a formula: read prompt, apply formula (for example, introduction + 3 body paragraphs + conclusion), turn in assignment. This quarter we will think about writing not as a formula but as a process, one through which we develop awareness of how to write for different audiences and in different genres, as well as how to use different genres to form our thinking into a sophisticated line of inquiry based on research. This is how we will define the “necessary trouble,” the habits and frames of mind, that enable effective writing.

Much of this course will be oriented around responding to (and in some cases giving) feedback on writing. Feedback will not be confined to correcting “mistakes”; we will think deeply about how better choices can be made through revision. By the end of the course you will not have “learned how to write”: this is an ongoing, lifelong process that cannot be covered in a quarter. You will have refined your writing and reading skills, and picked up habits that will help you communicate more effectively in different academic and professional settings.

Readings, discussion, and short- (2-3 pages) and medium-length (5-7 pages) writing assignments will be rooted in the following goals, and will engage with issues and ideas that matter to each individual:

Methods: to develop effective writing habits and understand when and how to use them
Research: to gather evidence, question its claims, and generate original work in conversation with it
Argumentation: to develop sophisticated arguments from a line of inquiry, and communicate why those arguments matter
Revision: to give and receive feedback that makes writing more clear, from surface-level issues to the deep reworking of an argument

You will be assessed on a self-chosen portfolio consisting of substantially revised versions of your most effective writing from the quarter, and a final critical essay reflecting on your growth toward the stated goals.

Syllabus

ENGL 111: Ways of Writing about Bleak House

2018-06-28T00:00:00-07:00

Terms Taught

Autumn 2017, Winter 2018

Summary

This composition course was organized around reading Charles Dickens’s Bleak House serially over the quarter while dipping into a few different critical perspectives.

Description

Humanistic modes of inquiry prioritize trying to ask the right questions, rather than necessarily finding the right answers. Charles Dickens’s epic 1853 novel Bleak House has an important question at its very core: “What connexion can there be,” the narrator implores us to ask, between rich and poor? Between social structures and individual freedom? Between past and present?

Bleak House’s inquisitive, pattern-finding narrative makes it a useful text to begin asking questions with in order to gain insight into society and culture through writing. We will spend the class working through Bleak House, reading it in “parts” over an extended period as its original audiences did, rather than all at once. Believe me: there is plenty to keep us busy all quarter in this long, jam-packed, funny, mysterious book. Taking our time with one text will let us slowly get used to reading a book written more than 150 years ago, and to hone close reading, argument building, and research skills. We will use Bleak House as a focal point for thinking, talking, and writing about questions that are still important today, including: what can literature do to help us understand problems of economic inequality? Gender? Climate change? The ways we consume culture? The differences (and similarities) in the ways people live in 1853 and 2017?

The goal of the course is not that you end up with an encyclopedic knowledge of Bleak House (though this is a risk you will have to take). Rather, you will conduct a case study in how literature helps us think critically, refine your writing and reading skills, and pick up habits that will help you communicate more effectively in different academic and professional settings. You will be assessed on a self-chosen portfolio consisting of substantially revised versions of your most effective writing from the quarter, and a final critical essay reflecting on your growth toward core learning goals.

Syllabus

BAVS 2017

2018-01-09T00:00:00-08:00

“Victorians Unbound” Conference Vlog

I was awarded a postgraduate bursary to attend the BAVS 2017 conference in Lincoln, UK. Many thanks again to BAVS for this generous award. In exchange, I was asked to make a vlog of my experiences. Below is the result, such as it is.

What it lacks in cinematographical refinement, I hope it makes up for in enthusiasm about the lovely setting at Bishop Grosseteste Universiy and in the city of Lincoln - especially Lincoln Castle, including its nineteenth-century prison, where they held the drinks reception - and the chance to see eminent Victorianist Christopher Ricks read from the poetry of James Henry.

The official post is available on The Victorianist blog.