CCU MAW ENGL 628 Dashboard
Description
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 21st-century popular 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.
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Where do I start when talking about the historical and cultural significance of England? There are thousands of years of history to this country and the empire it boasted for a couple hundred years. That's a lot of ground to cover in a short amount of time and a lot of that information will have very little connection or impact on my discussion. To narrow it down, I'm going to talk a little bit about England and the West Indies, since that relationship has the most direct relation to my discussion and poses the most direct impact on the novel.
A few hundred years ago, England loved telling people that they were inferior. This mentality meant that they often went out of their way to colonize places that weren't initially theirs, such as a handful of islands in the West Indies: Saint Christopher (Saint Kitts), Barbados, Jamaica, Nevis, Antigua, Montserrat, Dominica, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent, Tobago, and Grenda. These islands were cultivated for sugar and coffee and...
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Spanish Town was Jamaica’s capital until the year 1872 and is the site of the ruin of the Old King’s House, built in 1762, which housed the colonial governors until 1870 (Encyclopaedia Britannica). The city, originally a Taino settlement founded around 500 CE, was taken over by the Spanish in 1534 and was captured by the British in 1655 (Tortello). As the capital of Jamaica, Spanish Town plays an important, though peripheral, role in Wide Sargasso Sea. As early as the first page of the story, events in Spanish Town impact the characters in Wide Sargasso Sea. It is said in the novel that “they have their own misfortunes. Still waiting for compensation the English promised when the Emancipation Act was passed...
moreMartinique is an island territory controlled by France in the Caribbean. There are two distinct seasons in the region, rainy and dry, with a climate that stays above 59 Fahrenheit even in extreme cases. Martinique was first claimed by the French around 1658, with its official language being French even today. Although the main religion of the island is some form of Christianity, Encyclopedia Britannica notes that “some people incorporate elements of ‘vodou’ into their beliefs” and some vodou ceremonies are still held today (Encyclopedia Britannica).
As mentioned in the footnotes of Wide Sargasso Sea, it is also worth noting that France and England fought over the territory for an extended period of time. Encyclopedia Britannica details multiple instances of England stealing the territory from France, only to return it after conflict. The last disturbance between the two countries over Martinique ended in 1814, with the island finding itself under French rule once...
moreIn the later chapters of Jane Eyre, St. John returns to Cambridge to say goodbye to his friends before leaving on his mission trip to India. Cambridge is mentioned three times when referring to John–reiterating Bronte’s emphasis on the importance of education and her respect for education in general.
According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, Cambridge University was founded in 1209 and then “formal[ly recognized]...by Pope John XIII…in 1319.” Cambridge University was a well-respected institution during Charlotte Bronte’s time. According to MAR Tuker, “the discoveries of world-wide importance have been the work of Cambridge men—such were the three which revolutionised the science of the world, the laws of the circulation of the blood, of gravitation, of evolution” (385). Cambridge also has one of the largest libraries in the world, with over “three million” books in print–with “a copy of every book published in Great Britian” (Encyclopædia Britannica)....
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At the end of Jane Eyre, Rochester and Jane venture into London, England to see an oculist to help with Rochester’s blindness. During this time in the 19th century, London was the capital of the largest empire of the world, yet it was also very, very dirty (NPR). According to Lee Jackson, the filth was mostly made up of horse “dung,” as London was heavily populated by horses for transportation (NPR). Eventually, the state intervened to enact public health reform, in what the Victorians called “municipal socialism,” and these reforms were then carried out in the 20th century (NPR). One of the driving forces for sanitary reform was the strong stench...
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Vienna has been the modern-day capitol of Austria since the end of world war I. Many famous historical figures have lived in Vienna, such as Motzart, Beethoven, and Frued (visitingvienna.com). But the history of Vienna probably dates all the way back to the rule of the Roman empire, where the Roman military established a camp in what is now the city center (Wikipedia). During the 19th century, Vienna was under the rule of the Austrian Empire and between the years of 1867 and 1918 was ruled by the Austrio-Hungarian Empire, also called the Dual Monarchy (Wikipedia). At the time, Vienna was one of Europe's biggest cities. In Jane Eyre, Mr. Rochester lists Vienna to Jane as one of the many places he has traveled in his lifetime and pitches it to Jane as one of the many locations she will travel with him. "You shall sojourn at Paris, Rome, and...
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