Jane Eyre, Re-writing the Gothic Bildungsroman for 21-st Century Popular Culture:

Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847) by Charlotte Brontë is a seminal text in the Western feminist literature canon, published fifty-five years after Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and a year before the Seneca Falls convention launched the feminist movement in Western culture. But more impressively, it is a popular novel that has never once gone out of print in one-hundred and seventy-four years. And scores of authors, directors, and digital producers have adapted, revised, and modernized Bronte’s most famous novel because the narrative still has something to teach us. What better text could a class of writers study in order to explore what makes a story not only timeless but also popular and highbrow? As bell hooks—the recently deceased, trailblazing Black feminist scholar and activist—declared, “Whether we're talking about race or gender or class, popular culture is where the pedagogy is, it's where the learning is.”

As writers, we will explore the creative and rhetorical choices select twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors and directors have made when appropriating Jane Eyre’s narrative, paying attention to how each Jane is a positive (or negative) role model of physical, emotional, and spiritual growth. In other words, we are going to explore how this piece of classic literature remains relevant because of Jane’s didactic appeal within 21^st-century popular culture. Additionally, we will read (and proofread and correct) Charlotte’s sister Anne Brontë’s novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall—a wildly successful novel about a woman’s struggle to escape addiction and abuse—whose reputation Charlotte successfully tarnished in the Victorian popular press, leading it to go out of print. Anne’s novel is being rediscovered today as we seek role models on how to maintain poise and rise above the ubiquity of addiction, immature anger, and undeserved violence within our culture. In this course, we will also leverage the COVE’s (Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education) digital tools in order to create a collaborative “flipped classroom” learning experience.