Comparative Literature Department :: University at Buffalo

Dr. Daniel Hack :: Assistant Professor of English
:: Office: 429 Clemens Hall
:: Phone: (716) 645-2575, X.1038
:: FAX: (716) 645-5980
:: Email: dhack@acsu.buffalo.edu

Courses Taught

Graduate
Victorian Literature: Writing and Materiality
Allegory

Undergraduate
Victorian Age
Nineteenth-Century English Novel
Major British Writers 2
Studies in English Literature

Publications

Literary Paupers and Professional Authors: The Guild of Literature and Art," SEL, 1500-1900 (forthcoming Autumn 1999).
"'Sublimation Strange': Allegory and Authority in Bleak House," ELH 66:1 (Spring 1999). Inter-Nationalism: Castle Rackrent and Anglo-Irish Union," Novel: A ForumFiction, 29:2 (Winter 1996).

Lectures and Conference Papers

"The History of Henry Esmond's History of Print Culture." Victorian Division session, Modern Language Association Convention, Chicago, December 1999.
"The Butter-Boat of Benevolence and the Literary Marketplace," invited lecture, SUNY Binghamton, April 1999.
"Begging Off: Thomas Carlyle and the Author as Beggar," Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference, Loyola University, New Orleans, April 1998.
Chair, "Birthing the Nation in the Periphery: The National Novel in the US and UK," Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference, University of California, Berkeley, April 1997.
"Cash Payment and Charitable Interpretation,"Victorians Institute Conference, University of Virginia, October 1996.
Chair, "Urban Masculinities," Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference, University of California, Santa Cruz, April 1995.
Interpretation and Spontaneous Combustion in Bleak House," Dickens Project Conference, University of California, Riverside, February 1994.
"Autobiography in Distress: The Appeal of Begging Letters," Victorian Division session, Modern Language Association Convention, Toronto, December 1993.
Inter-Nationalism: Castle Rackrent and Anglo-Irish Union," Society for the Study of Narrative Literature session, Modern Language Association Convention, Toronto, December 1993

Recent Course Syllabi

English 528 Professor Daniel Hack
Spring 1999 Office: Clemens 429
T 3:30-6:10 645-2575 x1038
Clemens 309 dhack@acsu.buffalo.edu
Office hrs: TTh 11-12

Literature: Writing and Materiality

In his Principles of Political Economy, John Stuart Mill observes that "there is some bodily ingredient in the labour most purely mental, when it generates any external result. Newton could not have produced the Principia without the bodily exertion either of penmanship or of dictation." Fair enough, we might say, but what follows from this observation? Does this "bodily ingredient" make it possible to "assimilate the 'production' of texts . . . to the production of goods by factory workers . . . and to the experience of the resistance of matter in genuine manual labor"---or does such an equation constitute an act of "intellectual dishonesty," as Fredric Jameson charges? Does a recognition of the physicality of writing pose a threat to Theodor Adorno's claim that "culture originates in the radical separation of mental and physical work"? Or instead might such a recognition simply lead us to join Thomas Carlyle in savoring the paradox that "poor bits of rag-paper with black ink on them" constitute "the purest embodiment a Thought of man can have"?

As this farrago of questions and quotations is meant to suggest, this course will explore the ways in which the materiality of writing does and does not matter, both in Victorian culture and in twentieth-century criticism and critical theory. Focusing primarily on a series of Victorian novels (along with the linked Victorian discourses of authorship and begging-letter writing), we'll consider the significance writers have ascribed to, and the connections they have discovered between, the physical materiality of books and documents, the economic materiality of the literary marketplace, and the notorious "materiality of the signifier." We'll ask how bodies are like texts, and vice versa. At issue as well will be the possible material preconditions and material effects of cultural production, aesthetic experience, and specific tropes such as allegory and irony.

Course requirements: You will be expected to come to class each week prepared to begin discussion with a question or observation about the week's reading. You will also be required to write a 20-page paper addressing some text or theoretical issue raised by the course (due Tuesday, May 4), and to make a fifteen-minute presentation on the topic of your research paper.

Eng 679/Comp Lit 736
Spring 2000
Prof. Daniel Hack

Allegory

Usurped as a narrative mode by the novel and rejected as a rhetorical figure in the epochal poetics of Coleridge and Wordsworth, allegory has been widely denigrated and neglected for the better part of two centuries. Yet over the past quarter-century or so, allegory has emerged as a crucial topic in literary theory and criticism: allegory plays an indispensable role in the work of arguably the most important deconstructionist critic of our time, Paul de Man, of the leading U. S. Marxist critic, Fredric Jameson, and of the hugely influential if unclassifiable Walter Benjamin, and important work on and with allegory has also been done in recent times by critics working from avowedly feminist, new historicist, philosophical, postcolonial, postmodernist, and psychoanalytical perspectives (to name only those we'll tackle). Tracking allegory's progress through the wilderness of literary studies, as this course proposes to do, should therefore teach us much about the ways of both allegory and contemporary criticism and theory.

Above all, allegory will serve in this course as an exemplary site for the study of the nature of representation and interpretation and of the ideological (political, ethical, metaphysical, . . . ) implications and affiliations of tropes, literary forms, and reading practices. We will also spend a good deal of time examining (and joining in) the current rethinking of the version of literary history adumbrated in the first sentence of this course description. Accordingly, we will attend to the treatment and use of allegory in Romanticism and in the nineteenth-century novel; more specifically, we'll read poetry and prose by Coleridge and Wordsworth, and perhaps Shelley and/or Keats; and novels by Balzac (La Cousine Bette), Dickens (Bleak House), Eliot (Daniel Deronda), and Schreiner (Story of an African Farm), as well as tales by Hawthorne. Critics we'll read, in addition to those mentioned above, will likely include Aijaz Ahmad, Erich Auerbach, Jorge Luis Borges, Sharon Cameron, Jonathan Culler, Wai-chee Dimock, Joel Fineman, Angus Fletcher, Mary Jacobus, Roman Jakobson, Anne McClintock, Elaine Scarry, and Doris Sommer. If there is sufficient demand, we'll also find time to think about allegory and film, with Hitchcock's Vertigo our focus.

Course requirements: active class participation, oral presentation, term paper.


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	:: Daniel Hack
Faculty Associate Faculty Staff	:: Assistant Professor of English :: Office: 429 Clemens Hall :: Phone: (716) 645-2575, X.1038 :: FAX: (716) 645-5980 :: Email: dhack@acsu.buffalo.edu Courses Taught Graduate Victorian Literature: Writing and Materiality Allegory Undergraduate Victorian Age Nineteenth-Century English Novel Major British Writers 2 Studies in English Literature Publications Literary Paupers and Professional Authors: The Guild of Literature and Art," SEL, 1500-1900 (forthcoming Autumn 1999). "'Sublimation Strange': Allegory and Authority in Bleak House," ELH 66:1 (Spring 1999). Inter-Nationalism: Castle Rackrent and Anglo-Irish Union," Novel: A ForumFiction, 29:2 (Winter 1996). Lectures and Conference Papers "The History of Henry Esmond's History of Print Culture." Victorian Division session, Modern Language Association Convention, Chicago, December 1999. "The Butter-Boat of Benevolence and the Literary Marketplace," invited lecture, SUNY Binghamton, April 1999. "Begging Off: Thomas Carlyle and the Author as Beggar," Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference, Loyola University, New Orleans, April 1998. Chair, "Birthing the Nation in the Periphery: The National Novel in the US and UK," Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference, University of California, Berkeley, April 1997. "Cash Payment and Charitable Interpretation,"Victorians Institute Conference, University of Virginia, October 1996. Chair, "Urban Masculinities," Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference, University of California, Santa Cruz, April 1995. Interpretation and Spontaneous Combustion in Bleak House," Dickens Project Conference, University of California, Riverside, February 1994. "Autobiography in Distress: The Appeal of Begging Letters," Victorian Division session, Modern Language Association Convention, Toronto, December 1993. Inter-Nationalism: Castle Rackrent and Anglo-Irish Union," Society for the Study of Narrative Literature session, Modern Language Association Convention, Toronto, December 1993 Recent Course Syllabi English 528 Professor Daniel Hack Spring 1999 Office: Clemens 429 T 3:30-6:10 645-2575 x1038 Clemens 309 dhack@acsu.buffalo.edu Office hrs: TTh 11-12 Literature: Writing and Materiality In his Principles of Political Economy, John Stuart Mill observes that "there is some bodily ingredient in the labour most purely mental, when it generates any external result. Newton could not have produced the Principia without the bodily exertion either of penmanship or of dictation." Fair enough, we might say, but what follows from this observation? Does this "bodily ingredient" make it possible to "assimilate the 'production' of texts . . . to the production of goods by factory workers . . . and to the experience of the resistance of matter in genuine manual labor"---or does such an equation constitute an act of "intellectual dishonesty," as Fredric Jameson charges? Does a recognition of the physicality of writing pose a threat to Theodor Adorno's claim that "culture originates in the radical separation of mental and physical work"? Or instead might such a recognition simply lead us to join Thomas Carlyle in savoring the paradox that "poor bits of rag-paper with black ink on them" constitute "the purest embodiment a Thought of man can have"? As this farrago of questions and quotations is meant to suggest, this course will explore the ways in which the materiality of writing does and does not matter, both in Victorian culture and in twentieth-century criticism and critical theory. Focusing primarily on a series of Victorian novels (along with the linked Victorian discourses of authorship and begging-letter writing), we'll consider the significance writers have ascribed to, and the connections they have discovered between, the physical materiality of books and documents, the economic materiality of the literary marketplace, and the notorious "materiality of the signifier." We'll ask how bodies are like texts, and vice versa. At issue as well will be the possible material preconditions and material effects of cultural production, aesthetic experience, and specific tropes such as allegory and irony. Course requirements: You will be expected to come to class each week prepared to begin discussion with a question or observation about the week's reading. You will also be required to write a 20-page paper addressing some text or theoretical issue raised by the course (due Tuesday, May 4), and to make a fifteen-minute presentation on the topic of your research paper. Eng 679/Comp Lit 736 Spring 2000 Prof. Daniel Hack Allegory Usurped as a narrative mode by the novel and rejected as a rhetorical figure in the epochal poetics of Coleridge and Wordsworth, allegory has been widely denigrated and neglected for the better part of two centuries. Yet over the past quarter-century or so, allegory has emerged as a crucial topic in literary theory and criticism: allegory plays an indispensable role in the work of arguably the most important deconstructionist critic of our time, Paul de Man, of the leading U. S. Marxist critic, Fredric Jameson, and of the hugely influential if unclassifiable Walter Benjamin, and important work on and with allegory has also been done in recent times by critics working from avowedly feminist, new historicist, philosophical, postcolonial, postmodernist, and psychoanalytical perspectives (to name only those we'll tackle). Tracking allegory's progress through the wilderness of literary studies, as this course proposes to do, should therefore teach us much about the ways of both allegory and contemporary criticism and theory. Above all, allegory will serve in this course as an exemplary site for the study of the nature of representation and interpretation and of the ideological (political, ethical, metaphysical, . . . ) implications and affiliations of tropes, literary forms, and reading practices. We will also spend a good deal of time examining (and joining in) the current rethinking of the version of literary history adumbrated in the first sentence of this course description. Accordingly, we will attend to the treatment and use of allegory in Romanticism and in the nineteenth-century novel; more specifically, we'll read poetry and prose by Coleridge and Wordsworth, and perhaps Shelley and/or Keats; and novels by Balzac (La Cousine Bette), Dickens (Bleak House), Eliot (Daniel Deronda), and Schreiner (Story of an African Farm), as well as tales by Hawthorne. Critics we'll read, in addition to those mentioned above, will likely include Aijaz Ahmad, Erich Auerbach, Jorge Luis Borges, Sharon Cameron, Jonathan Culler, Wai-chee Dimock, Joel Fineman, Angus Fletcher, Mary Jacobus, Roman Jakobson, Anne McClintock, Elaine Scarry, and Doris Sommer. If there is sufficient demand, we'll also find time to think about allegory and film, with Hitchcock's Vertigo our focus. Course requirements: active class participation, oral presentation, term paper.
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	Department of Comparative Literature \| 638 Clemens Hall \| Buffalo, NY 14260-4610 Telephone: 716.645.2066 \| Fax: 716.645.5979 \| Email: complit@buffalo.edu © College of Arts and Sciences 2005. All rights reserved. This website is supported by the College of Arts and Sciences web team. Inquiries or comments about this website should be directed to the College of Arts and Sciences webmaster.