Kraft, Elizabeth
TR 3 :30 PM
Park Hall 0145
The latter half of the eighteenth century has been known for generations as "The Age of Johnson" due to the compelling personality and achievement of Samuel Johnson. Johnson was the author of the English dictionary, the Rambler essays, the Lives of the Poets, Rasselas, and the editor of Shakespeare's plays. He was also the subject of the massive biography by James Boswell which has made Johnson's dominant presence in figure and in speech available to all generations since the eighteenth century. In many ways, we honor Johnson because his career set the pattern for the professional literary life. He was a poet, a novelist, a lexicographer, a critic and an editor. More than that, though, Johnson occupied a position in his time of what we might call today “moral and cultural authority.” He gained that position through his published work, primarily, though his presence and his conversation were also important contributing factors.
In this course, we will consider the topic Samuel Johnson and Cultural Authority. We will study the works of Johnson and his biographer Boswell in our exploration of Johnson’s own thought and reputation. We will also read two novels by his contemporaries (and friends) Oliver Goldsmith and Charlotte Lennox. We will conclude the class with a study of Anna Letitia Barbauld whose cultural and literary achievement is parallel to—and perhaps as influential in her own time as—that of Johnson. Why, then, do we not speak of an Age of Barbauld? Why and how was her “cultural authority” limited while Johnson’s authority extends, some would argue, into our own time? These and other questions regarding “cultural authority” will be the central preoccupations of our course, though your own interests and concerns are welcome to redirect our investigations and discussions at any point.