Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights
3009 Broadway
New York, NY 10027
A novel of cruelty, poisoned love, ruthless necessity, intergenerational vendettas, memory and revenge, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights remains an opulent enigma. First published under the male pseudonym, Ellis Bell, the book puzzled and repulsed its initial readers, who castigated it for immorality but reluctantly acknowledged its inscrutable power. According to her sister Charlotte, Emily “did not know what she had done” in creating characters like Heathcliff and Catherine. Wuthering Heights was a work channeled from elsewhere, “hewn in a wild workshop.” Why does Charlotte, in lionizing Emily’s genius, seek to excuse her of responsibility for everything that makes Wuthering Heights so profoundly and persistently unsettling?
Why have readers found Wuthering Heights such an enduringly disturbing book? And why have contemporary critics turned to this novel in order to make claims about narrative theory, gender, desire, the social dynamics of Victorian empire, vengeance, song, industrialization, and personhood? What should readers make of the arc of the vengeful Heathcliff, especially with respect to the operations of race and ethnicity? How does the novel picture problems of justice, malice, property, and sex? How should we understand this novel’s debts to the Gothic, Romanticism, realism, and to its own moment of composition? And what does it mean to call Wuthering Heights a work of genius or to call Brontë herself a genius?
In addition to the text of Wuthering Heights, this course will feature a selection of critical and creative responses, which are likely to include (among others) the work of Anne Carson, Claire Jarvis, Minae Mizumura, Caryl Phillips, Susan Stewart, Raymond Williams, and Virginia Woolf.
Course Schedule
Monday, 6:30-9:30pmApril 08 — April 29, 2019
4 weeks
$315.00
Registration Open