SELCS

‘Cryptographs’: Tombs, Museums, and the Novel


Course code: ELCS6001
Tutor: Dr Jann Matlock
Level: intermediate
Mode of Assessment: 2 assessed essays of 2000 words each
Term: taught in term 1

Course Description:
We will move in this course into three spaces for the imagination: the museum, the tomb, and the novel. We will ask what each harbors and what each hides. We will consider the codes that make each possible. Each place is a kind of vault, sealing in treasures and promising a commemoration of what no longer lives in the present. The dead, the undead, and the lifeless inhabit these enclosures into which we wander. What do we want from these places when we visit? What secrets do we expect to find there? What secrets do we betray when we make these monuments? What desires do we hide in them? What desires do they guard? How do we decide what to place in these museums? From what do these crypts keep their contents safe? The course title plots the theory of culture with an expression meant to tease and puzzle. ‘Cryptographs’ – a word that might cover secret writings, secrets of writing, writings on tombs, deciphering tools, interpreters of secrets – will provide the basis for our tours of tombs, museums and the novel.

We might have studied the relationship between art and death. Instead, we shall consider the places where we put art works and dead things and the choices we make when we enclose them there. The texts we will consider suggest an itinerary that enables us to see what these three spaces may contain. Dracula’s coffins hold the undead, the ‘beautiful corpses’ of ‘New Women,’ and the ciphering of vampirized secretaries. The Woman in White tells ‘the story of what a Woman’s patience can endure and what a man’s resolution can achieve’ in a series of accounts of duplicitous secret writings and false tombs. At the center of Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Rebecca--and of our course--lie the secrets of dead women that must be read. Goethe’s Elective Affinities, Zola’s L’Assommoir, and James’s Wings of the Dove not only set the terms for the literary museum, but thematize the collections of paintings that made access to art a reality for the middle classes of the nineteenth century. These three novels play on this strange relationship between collections of art, enclosures for the dead, and writings that encode our secrets. They also let us ask why the cadavers these novels contain are frequently female, and if a woman’s truth can be encrypted anywhere but on her coffin. These explorations will provide the impetus for class discussions as we consider where we readers stand in relation to cryptographs. You should expect to venture out on two or three field trips and see a couple of films on your own.

Primary Texts:

  • Bram Stoker, Dracula (any edition)
  • Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (Penguin)
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities)(Penguin)
  • Émile Zola, L’Assommoir (same title in English) (Penguin)
  • Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (any edition)
  • Vertigo and Rebecca (dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

Initial Secondary Bibliography:

  • Theodor W. Adorno, “Valéry Proust Museum,” in Prisms
  • Svetlana Alpers, “The Museum as a Way of Seeing,” in I. Karp and S. Levine, eds, Exhibiting Cultures
  • Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre
  • Richard Etlin, The Architecture of Death
  • Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins
  • Jacques Derrida, “Foreward: Fors,” in N. Abraham and M. Torok, The Wolfman’s Magic Word
  • Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny