Scaffolding for assignment 1:

Keep a “Space/Time Journal” where you note down passages from the text that deal with space/time. How do the characters move through space and interact with the people and places in their environment? What are the descriptions of architecture and landscape like? Use the journal to free-write the different ways in which these passages help you think of the spaces that you occupy in your own life (neighborhood, university, city).

Scaffolding for assignment 2:

a) Read David Diaches’ “The Victorian Novel” in A Critical History of English Literature Vol IV and list out the salient points of the literary and political background of the Victorian novel presented in it. Read Peter Brooks’ “Dickens and Nonrepresentation” in Realist Vision (2005) and write down what you think is the main argument Brooks is making about realism in general and Dickens’ realism in particular.

b) Peer review: Divide yourselves into groups of two and discuss what you have each written. Think of a thesis statement (what aspect of the novel you want to work on) based on what you have read and discussed. Make a 10-minute recording of your rehearsed discussion and submit it.

Scaffolding for assignment 3:

This scaffolding assignment will be more interactive in nature. I will expect you to work on the final paper ahead of time and discuss them with me. For the first assignment option, you will have to present an annotated bibliography on the essay on Doctor Thorne and Middlemarch two weeks before the submission deadline and discuss it with me. For the second assignment option, you will have to identify two to three passages from the secondary texts (Paul Ricoeur’s “Time and Narrative: Threefold Mimesis” in Time and Narrative or Bakhtin’s “The Forms of Time and of the Chronotope of the Novel in the Dialogic Imagination) that appear difficult to you (but relevant to your assignment) and discuss them with me.