| Course Description |
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To understand the Victorians we will explore their architecture on campus and in downtown Austin. Our reading and writing about Victorian literature will focus on leadership, respect for diversity, and compassion for others and other species. First of all, tracing the leadership motif in Victorian literature will reveal the purposes of universities, the liberal arts, and the English major. Reading Hardy and Carroll, we will compare the life of Victorian college students with that of students now. Then we will discover that "pattern of conversion" from egoism to a higher purpose that characterizes so many leaders, now as well as then. We will focus on those who led the movement for compassion for animals in Victorian England, and faced the ensuing conflicts both with Darwin's theory of the "survival of the fittest" and with Victorian imperialism. We will focus especially on the failure of many Victorians in India to acknowledge the more compassionate treatment of animals by Jains and Hindus. Students should be prepared to think for themselves, for careful reading, and a lot of informal writing. Inspired by Victorian and university role models, formal writing projects may be devoted to a personal leadership vision. In any case, all students will begin with road maps of their lives. Then they will write papers, with illustrations, and save them in web format. Initial comments on the projects will be made by other students in the SWORD peer editing system, with the instructor then focusing on polishing subsequent hard copies for coherence, word choice, punctuation, etc.. |