SCHEDULE
This page contains a detailed schedule of the presentations, discussion topics, and readings. Apart from the first day, all of the meetings will be held in one of the Clark Library’s seminar rooms from 9.45am to 12.45pm, usually with a twenty-minute coffee break at 11.00am. The Project Director will hold regular office hours from 2.00pm to 4.30pm on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. He will also be available for consultation at other times during the week by appointment. NEH Summer Scholars will be able to meet with the Graduate Student Researchers (GSRs) from 1.30pm to 2.30pm on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday each week. The technical assistant, Alastair Thorne, will be available each lunchtime and afternoon when the seminar meets. It is important to note that the Clark Library is open Monday to Friday from 9.30am to 4.45pm. The library is not open on the weekend.
Schedule of Presentations, Discussion Topics, and Readings
10.00am-12.00pm and 1.30pm-4.30pm, Monday, June 25, 2012
Introduction to the Summer Seminar and to the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
The first day of the summer seminar will involve two meetings. In the morning the Project Director, Professor Joseph Bristow, will introduce all of the NEH Summer Scholars to one another. He will explain both the aims and objectives of the Summer Seminar, the schedule of assigned and recommended readings, his office hours, the NEH document on “Principles of Civility” (see http://www.neh.gov/grants/principles-of-civility.html) the seminar collaborative learning website at www.ccle.ucla.edu, the availability of the GSRs, and the events that will follow during the afternoon. He will inform the NEH Summer Scholars of how to approach the next meeting, which focuses on Wilde’s undergraduate career at Magdalen College, Oxford (1874-1878). In addition, he will show the NEH Summer Scholars a sample of the unique manuscript sources held in the Wilde archive housed at the Clark Library. During lunch, which will be funded by the Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies (which administers all academic programs arranged at the Clark Library), NEH Summer Scholars will have the opportunity to meet Barbara Fuchs (Director of Center), Candis Snoddy (Assistant Director), and several members of the library staff: Gerald Cloud (Librarian), Nina Schneider (Head Cataloger), Rebecca Fenning Marschall (Cataloging), Scott Jacobs (Reader Services), and Suzanne Tatian (Coordinator of Programs and Fellowships). In addition, the NEH Summer Scholars will meet with the two Graduate Students Researchers who will be responsible for locating, borrowing, and delivering printed sources held at other libraries within UCLA’s extensive library system. In the afternoon, the NEH Summer Scholars will spend ninety minutes with members of the library staff, who will demonstrate how to make the best use of such resources as UCLA’s online library catalog, the online finding-tool relating to the Wilde archive, the extensive range of electronic databases relating to the study of Wilde’s career, and the kinds of materials that the Clark Library keeps on open shelves and in the stacks. Like most rare book libraries, the Clark Library has certain idiosyncrasies when it comes to archiving its holdings, and the librarians will enlighten NEH Summer Scholars on some of its more noteworthy quirks.
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Main Campus Visit
The NEH Summer Scholars will be invited to a series of meetings held on the main UCLA campus at Westwood, some twelve miles from the Clark Library. The purpose of this morning session is to introduce the seminar members to the resources of the Young Research Library (YRL), which ranks among the finest university research libraries in the world. Of special interest to the NEH Summer Scholars will be the YRL’s Department of Special Collections, which contains a number of resources that relate to the seminar syllabus. Besides receiving tours of both the main library and the Department of Special Collections, the seminar members will also be able to register as library users through the Bruin Online office. Once they have registered with Bruin Online, the NEH Summer Scholars will—with the help of Alastair Thorne—be able to download the software that will give them access to a range of web-based resources to which UCLA subscribes. The “Bruin Card” will also provide seminar members will full access to a range of UCLA’s sports and related facilities.
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Wilde at Oxford (I)
The two meetings dedicated to Wilde’s undergraduate years at Oxford will focus on how the Irish writer fashioned himself as an aesthete, a poet, an intellectual, and a potential Catholic convert. The assigned readings for the first of these two discussions of Wilde and Oxford focus on Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (Random House, 1988), 16-100, Horst Schroeder, Additions and Corrections to Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde (Privately Printed, 2002), 8-37, and Merlin Holland, The Wilde Album (Fourth Estate, 1997), 31-55. Recommended reading includes Merlin Holland, “Biography and the Art of Lying,” in Peter Raby, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 3-17, consulting uncataloged boxes of caricatures of Wilde (1875-1880); unpublished correspondence from Wilde’s undergraduate contemporary, David Hunter-Blair, and Rev. Sebastian Bowden (the Oratory, London); and Walter Pater, “Conclusion” to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (Macmillan, 1873).
Friday, June 29, 2012
Wilde at Oxford (II)
This meeting concentrates on Wilde’s ambitions to establish himself as a poet with Catholic and aesthetic sympathies and as an intellectual who had a first-rate training in Classics. The assigned reading includes the following poems: “Charmides,” “The Burden of Itys,” “Sonnet on Approaching Italy,” “Sonnet (Written in Holy Week at Genoa),” “Urbs Sacra Aeterna,” “The Grave of Keats,” “Sonnet: On Hearing the Dies Irae Sung at the Sistine Chapel,” “Italia,” “The Grave of Shelley,” “At Verona,” “Magdalen Walks,” “Ravenna” (all in Complete Works); “The Rise of Historical Criticism” (Complete Works, 1198-1241); selections from the “Philosophy” notebook (Course Reader). Recommended reading includes consulting “Plato’s Philosophy” (6-page unpublished notebook); unpublished 20-page notebook relating to preparation for Honours Moderations examination (1876); letters to Oxford friends and to family members, Complete Letters (Fourth Estate, 2000), 5-73; and Christofer Foss, “Oscar Wilde and the Importance of Being Romantic,” in Joseph Bristow, ed., The Wilde Archive: Traditions, Histories, Resources (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012).
Monday, July 2, 2012
Wilde in London, 1879-1881
This meeting concentrates attention on Wilde’s rising celebrity c.1879 as the self-appointed “Professor of Aesthetics,” his friendship with artist Frank Miles and their avant-garde circle in Chelsea, and his earliest attempts to establish himself as a dramatist in the metropolis. Assigned reading includes poems which appeared in London journals such as Time and The World from 1879 onward—“Athanasia,” “The New Helen,” “Phèdre,” “Queen Henrietta Maria,” “Portia,” “Ave Imperatrix,” “Pan. Double Villanelle,” “Sen Artysty; or, the Artist’s Dream,” “Libertatis Sacra Fames,” “Impression du Matin,” and “Helas!” (all in Complete Works); and the drama on political sedition in Russia, Vera, or the Nihilists (1880) (Complete Works, 681-721). Recommended reading includes consultation of editions of Wilde’s Poems (David Bogue, 1881) and the reissue of Poems (1892), with different boards, spine and title page (Elkin Mathews and John Lane, the Bodley Head, 1892); reviews of Poems and Vera in Karl Beckson, ed., Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970, 33-58); Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small, Oscar Wilde’s Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2000), especially 85-90 and 135-77; Nicholas Frankel, Oscar Wilde’s Decorated Books (University of Michigan Press, 2000), 25-46 and 109-130; uncataloged boxes containing caricatures of Wilde as “Professor of Aesthetics’; George Du Maurier’s caricatures of the Aesthetic Movement in Punch; and Frank Miles’s unpublished family correspondence with Wilde.
Wednesday, July 4, 2012
Independence Day. No instruction.
Friday, July 6, 2012
Wilde’s American Tour, 1882
This meeting will explore why Richard D’Oyly Carte approached Wilde to undertake an arduous year-long lecture tour which complemented the American production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s satire on the Aesthetic Movement, Patience. Discussion will focus on Wilde’s lecture topics and the sources on which he drew. Assigned reading: transcripts of four of Wilde’s lectures in America—“The English Renaissance of Art,” “House Decoration,” “Art and the Handicraftsman,” and “The Irish Poets and Poetry of the Nineteenth Century” (copies of these lectures, the first three taken from the 1908 edition of Miscellanies and the fourth from the University Review [Dublin], 1955, will be circulated to the NEH Summer Scholars). The NEH Summer Scholars will have the opportunity to consult the 900 pages of unpublished items collected by American independent scholar Richard Butler Glaenzer in the 1910s. This archive of materials contains information and insights unavailable in any of the printed sources about Wilde’s tour of Cana and the United States. Recommended reading: Wilde, “L’Envoi” [introduction Rennell Rodd, Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf (1882)], in Miscellanies, ed. Robert Ross, Collected Works, vol. XIV (Methuen, 1908), 30-41; Lloyd Lewis and Henry Justin Smith, Oscar Wilde Discovers America (Harcourt, Brace, 1936); Mary Warner Blanchard, Oscar Wilde’s America: Counterculture in the Gilded Age (Yale University Press, 1998); Gregory Castle, “Misrecognizing Wilde: Modernism and the Revival on Tour in America,” in Bristow, ed. The Wilde Archive; Mary Eliza Haweis, The Art of Beauty (Harper, 1878) and The Art of Decoration (1881); opening shots of Wilde (Director: Brian Gilbert, 1997); Holland, The Wilde Album, 60-104; W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, Patience, in Ian Bradley, ed., The Complete Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan (Oxford University Press, 1996), 265-353; uncataloged boxes containing images (notably the publicity photographs taken at Napoleon Sarony’s studio in New York) and journalistic pieces of Wilde’s American tour.
Monday, July 9, 2012
Wilde the Journalist, 1877-1890
This meeting will help the NEH Summer Scholars understand that for a period of thirteen years Wilde was a prolific journalist and hardworking editor whose output included a large number of reviews for the Pall Mall Gazette, a well-respected, though frequently controversial, London evening paper. Discussion will concentrate in particular on Wilde’s emergence as an “aesthetic” critic—a role that led to serious conflicts with American painter Jimmy Whistler. Assigned reading: “The Grosvenor Gallery” (Dublin University Magazine, 1877), “Woman’s Dress” (Pall Mall Gazette, 1885), “Ideas upon Dress Reform” (Pall Mall Gazette, 1885), “Mr. Whistler’s Ten O’Clock” (Pall Mall Gazette, 1885), “The Relation of Dress to Art” (Pall Mall Gazette, 1885), “The Unity of the Arts” (Pall Mall Gazette, 1885); James Abbott McNeill Whistler, “The Ten O’Clock Lecture” (1885) (some of the aforementioned items appear in Complete Works, 942-79, others will be copied and circulated to NEH Summer Scholars), and The Woman’s World, July 1889 (Course Reader). Recommended reading: letters to and from Whistler, in Complete Letters, 418-20; Loretta Clayton, “Oscar Wilde, Aesthetic Dress, and Modern Woman: Or Why Sargent’s Portrait of Ellen Terry Appeared in the Woman’s World,” and Molly Youngkin, “The Aesthetic Character of Oscar Wilde’s The Woman’s World,” in Bristow, ed. The Wilde Archive; Lionel Lambourne, The Aesthetic Movement (Phaidon Press, 1996); Mary Eliza Haweis, The Art of Dress (Chatto and Windus, 1879); Guy and Small, Oscar Wilde’s Profession, 14-49; Anya Clayworth, “Introduction,” in Wilde, Selected Journalism (Oxford University Press, 2003), ix-xxxi; and the introduction to the Oxford English Texts edition of Wilde’s journalism, ed. John Stokes, Mark Turner, and Russell Jackson (Oxford University Press, 2012).
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Wilde: The Critic as Artist
This meeting provides the opportunity to analyze Wilde’s emergence as a serious cultural critic in the mid-1880s, a phase of his career that culminates in the publication of his distinguished collection of long essays, Intentions (James R. Osgood and McIlvaine, 1891). Our attention will focus on two of Wilde’s long dialogic essays. Assigned reading: “The Decay of Lying” and “The Critic as Artist” (Parts I and II), in Complete Works, 1071-1092 and 1108-1155. Recommended reading: Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1865); Walter Pater, “Preface” to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873); Lawrence Danson, Wilde’s Intentions: The Artist in His Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 127-47; Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton University Press, 2001), 147-76; consultation of volumes 25 and 28 of the Nineteenth Century (where the earliest versions of “The Decay of Lying” and “The Critic as Artist” appeared); and Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (1973).
Friday, July 13, 2012
Wilde , “The Canterville Ghost,” and “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.”
Our meeting will concentrate on two of Wilde’s most sustained works of fiction to date—“The Canterville Ghost” and “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.”—which first appeared in the Court and Society Review and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1887 and 1889, respectively. “The Canterville Ghost” is an amusing reflection on what Wilde sometimes called “The American Invasion” of England. The satirical ghost story it tells draws amply on Wilde’s knowledge of the United States. “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.,” by comparison, is a story with scholarly ambitions. It ingeniously constructs an imaginary theory about the love-triangle dramatized in Shakespeare’s sonnets, and in the process it enters into a longstanding debate about the identity of “Mr. W.H.” that once more came to prominence in a number of Victorian periodicals during the 1880s. Discussion will consider Wilde’s interest in scholarship on Shakespeare’s sonnets, his fascination with the cryptic homoeroticism embedded in many of these famous poems, and the hostile reaction that Wilde received in some quarters after his story appeared. Assigned reading: “The Canterville Ghost” and “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” (Complete Works, 184-204 and 302-51). Recommended reading: Horst Schroeder, The Portrait of Mr. W.H.: Its Composition, Publication, and Reception (Technische Universität Carolo-Wilhelmina zu Braunschweig, Seminar für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1984), and Annotations to Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Mr. W.H. (Privately Printed, 1986); Lawrence Danson, Wilde’s Intentions, 102-26; Richard Halpern, Shakespeare’s Perfume: Sodomy, Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan (Philadelphia; University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Joseph Bristow, “‘A Complex Multiform Creature’: Wilde’s Sexual Identities,” in Peter Raby, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde, 195-218, and Rachel Ablow, :Reading and Re-Reading: Wilde, Newman, and the Fictions of Belief,” and James Campbell, “Sexual Gnosticism: The Procreative Code of ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’” in Joseph Bristow, ed. The Wilde Archive.
Monday, July 16, 2012
Wilde and The Picture of Dorian Gray
In this meeting, the NEH Summer Scholars will examine the circumstances in which Wilde came to write his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, in late 1889 and early 1890. The class will focus on the earliest appearance of the novel in the American Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in July 1890, and its subsequent revision and publication in a single volume (designed by Charles Ricketts) by London publisher Ward, Lock & Co. Discussion topics will include Wilde’s development of the aesthetic novel, Wilde’s interest in male-male desire, Classical learning, dandyish discourse, scientific allusions, and the controversy sparked by the 1890 edition of the narrative, a controversy which resurged in Wilde’s libel suit in April 1895. Assigned reading: Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Complete Works, 17-159), Joseph Bristow, “Introduction,” in Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray: The 1890 and 1891 Texts, in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. 3 (Oxford University Press, 2005), xi-lx, and John Gray, Silverpoints (in Course Reader). Recommended reading: Reviews in Beckson, ed., The Critical Heritage, 67-86; Matt Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 103-116; Richard Dellamora, “Representation and Homophobia in The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Victorian Newsletter, 73 (1998), 28-31; Heather Seagrott, “Hard Science, Soft Psychology, and Amorphous Art in The Picture of Dorian Gray,” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 38 (2002), 741-59; Talia Schaffer, “The Origins of the Aesthetic Novel: Ouida, Wilde, and the Popular Romance,” in Joseph Bristow, ed., Oscar Wilde: Contextual Conditions (University of Toronto Press, 2003), 212-29; Neil Hultgren, “Oscar Wilde’s Poetic Injustice in The Picture of Dorian Gray,” in Bristow, ed. The Wilde Archive.
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Wilde and Society Comedy (I)
This meeting examines Wilde’s highly successful decision to write Society comedies for the fashionable St James’s Theatre. Discussion topics will focus on Wilde’s main sources (Dumas fils’ Francillon and W.S. Gilbert’s Engaged), the kinds of plays performed at the St. James’s Theatre under actor-manager George Alexander; the modern sexual politics of the play; and Wilde’s interest in the figure of the dandy. Assigned reading: Lady Windermere’s Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest (Complete Works, 420-64 and 357-419), and Robert Hichens, The Green Carnation (Course Reader). Recommended reading: Peter Raby, “Wilde’s Comedies of Society” in Raby, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 143-60; Felicia Ruff, Transgressive Props; Or, Oscar Wilde’s E(a)rnest Signifer,” in Bristow, ed. The Wilde Archive; Joel H. Kaplan and Sheila Stowell, Theatre and Fashion: From Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Alexandre Dumas fils, Francillon: Pièce en trois actes (Calmann Lévy, 1887); Ellen Moers, The Dandy (Viking, 1960); letters to George Alexander in Complete Letters, 512-17; reviews in Beckson, ed., The Critical Heritage, 119-131; Barry Duncan, The St. James’s Theatre: Its Strange and Complete History, 1835-1957 (Barry and Rockcliff, 1964); and manuscripts and typescript of play held in the archive.
Friday, July 20, 2012
Wilde and Society Comedy (II)
This meeting focuses on Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, which opened in January 1895. The Clark Library holds the manuscript, the corrected typescript, a press file about the 1895 production, and the corrected proofs of the 1899 edition (published by Leonard Smithers). NEH Summer Scholars will thus be able to follow the process of composition, production, reception, and (somewhat belated) publication of this work. Assigned reading: An Ideal Husband (Complete Works, 515-82). Recommended reading: John Paul Riquelme, “Wilde’s Anadoodlgram: A Genetic, Performative Reading of An Ideal Husband,” in Bristow, ed., The Wilde Archive. NEH Summer Scholars will be encouraged to consult the archive to look at either specific scenes (or parts of scenes) in the manuscript and corrected typescript to detect where key changes were made or the press clippings in order to gauge the reception of the play. On Wilde’s relations with Smithers, see James G. Nelson, Publisher to the Decadents; Leonard Smithers in the Careers of Beardsley, Wilde, Dowson (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 173-223.
Monday, July 23, 2012
Wilde in Prison: De Profundis
This meeting looks at the 30,000-word document frequently referred to as De Profundis, which Wilde completed during the final months of his two-year prison sentence at Reading Gaol (i.e. late 1896 and early 1897). Discussion will focus on how we might best classify this document, the circumstances of its composition, the typescripts that were made, and its complicated publication history which begins in the early twentieth century. Assigned reading: De Profundis (Complete Works, 980-1059). NB: The fully annotated edition in Complete Letters (683-780) is preferable. Ian Small, “Introduction,” in Wilde, De Profundis—“Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis,” The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. 2 (Oxford University Press, 2005), 1-31. Recommended reading: Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford University Press, 1986), 179-95; Ellis Hanson, “Wilde’s Exquisite Pain,” in Bristow, ed., Oscar Wilde; Contextual Conditions, 101-25; Ian Small, “Love-Letter, Spiritual Autobiography, or Prison Writing? Identity and Value in De Profundis,” in Bristow, ed., Oscar Wilde: Contextual Conditions, 86-100; Horst Schroeder, unpublished review of Small’s edition of De Profundis; and Nicholas Frankel, Review of Small’s edition, The Wildean (2006).
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Wilde in Exile: The Ballad of Reading Gaol
Our penultimate meeting will discuss the ballad that Wilde starting writing about his two-year prison sentence after he left jail on May 19, 1897. NEH Summer Scholars will explore how and why the poem was a great success; it became, much to Wilde’s surprise, the bestselling work of his career. Besides investigating the obvious allusions in the poem—notably, passages from the Bible, Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner—we will consider some of the less obvious sources on which Wilde drew. We will also assess the position of the poem in relation to pressing debates about prison reform in 1898. Assigned reading: The Ballad of Reading Gaol (Complete Works, 883-99). Recommended reading: Thomas Hood, “The Dream of Eugene Aram” (1829), A.E. Housman’s “On Moonlit Heath, and Lonesome Bank” (in A Shropshire Lad [1896]); reviews in Beckson, ed., The Critical Heritage, 211-24; Wilde’s two letters, “Some Cruelties of Prison Life,” which appeared in the Daily Chronicle in late May 1897 (Complete Works, 1060-70); Leonard Nathan, “The Ballads of Reading Gaol: At the Limits of the Lyric,” in Critical Essays on Oscar Wilde, ed. Regenia Gagnier (G.K. Hall, 1990), 213-22; and Séan McConville, English Local Prisons 1860-1900: Next Only to Death (Routledge, 1995).
Friday, July 27, 2012
Review of “Oscar Wilde and His Circle”
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