syllabus freewrite

I want my students to learn that Victorian and Modern British Literature is England’s last great hope at culture, and it comes from everywhere but their tiny little island. Just as our modern military chases oil around the world, private and public money was extensively spent defining the Other and reaping its resources to maintain a way of life based on commodified goods. The second Industrial Revolution gave rise to a middle-class, but the wealth gap continued to grow as well, making the working middle-class just a paycheck over the poor. But larger than that, the Industrial Revolution really means the start of stuff.

Wealth shifts from community to the individual, to our modern hyper-individual (afterall it’s Margaret Thatcher who pronounces that “there’s no such thing as society”). What this means is that people move from community sustaining practices to urban survival of the fittest. The fittest however has little to do with health, welfare, or peace. Fitness becomes the GNP, and for that to happen people have to buy stuff: experiences, treasures, comforts. The staggering swirl of goods does not bring an end to this drive, but it does bring an end to the British Empire.

The places where most of this raw stuff came from (and still comes from) had a different experience. They had the culture that the Victorian Empire built herself upon. They had the resources to maintain a way of life too – had. The collapse of the British Empire who held sway of a quarter of the earth’s population, gave rise to a dramatic influx of cultures, languages, customs, technologies, musics, and ideologies around the world. This is the beginning of our global life.