Brontës midsummer courses

A couple of summer courses starting today, July 15th:

The Brontës
University of Oxford. Department for Continuing Education
Residential Programmes Summer Schools - The Oxford Experience
Sun 15 to Sat 21 Jul 2012

The Brontë sisters lived and wrote together. They went to the same schools, loved the same Yorkshire landscape, and all worked as governesses. Similar experiences produced very different novels. This course will examine Jane Eyre, Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights. There will be discussion of the links between the Brontës’ lives and their writings and consideration of other influences, both literary and historical, upon their work. The Brontë myth will also be discussed; are their lives and novels as romantic as is often thought?

Programme details

Seminars meet each weekday morning, 09.15-10.45 and 11.15-12.45, with afternoons free for course-related field trips, individual study or exploring the many beautiful places in and around the city. Monday:
Introduction: Life, literary influences, the historical context.
Tuesday:
Discussion of Jane Eyre: Narrative issues; the heroine and her problems; realism or romance?
Wednesday:
Discussion of Agnes Grey: Men, women and their problems; social issues in the novel.
Thursday:
Discussion of Wuthering Heights: Narrative experiments? The problems of interpretation.
Friday:
Concluding discussion: The technical achievements, the popularity of the novels; the need (or otherwise) of the biographies; fantasists or feminists?

The Brontë Sisters 1847-48
Cornell University
School of Continuing Education and Summer Sessions
Led by David Faulkner
Week 2: July 15-21, 2012

In part lulled by Hollywood, we recall Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Emily's Wuthering Heights as great love stories—Cathy and Heathcliff, plain Jane and Mr. Rochester—repressing just how radically unsettling they are, how teeming with rage and eroticized violence. Like their authors, the novels are studies in contrast: both Romantic and Victorian, feminine and masculine, revolutionary and reactionary, atavistic and ultramodern. Each combines the most anarchic of emotions within ironclad aesthetic control, perhaps reflecting such wrenching social, economic, and political changes of the "Hungry Forties" as the triumph of free trade, the earliest stirrings of a women's movement, the floods of Irish immigration, and the European revolutions in 1848. Were the Brontës dreamy eccentrics or shrewd social realists, "natural" geniuses or self-conscious artists? We will untangle autobiography from art and myth from reality as we set the sisters back into the context of their time.