Abstract
This chapter discusses my experience teaching an interdisciplinary capstone course on ideas of filth, disease, and contamination in urban nineteenth-century Britain. As “matter out of place,” garbage is an ideal topic for exploring ways of knowing and seeing still central both to the Victorians and to us today. What did it mean to be dirty in a culture riven by changing notions of urban life and industrial labor, of gender and sexuality, of colony and metropolis, and of social class and economic value? Along with the nineteenth-century novel, this class addressed materials from a wide variety of fields (anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, the visual arts, public health). It culminated with a substantial final capstone project, designed for students from a variety of skill levels and perspectives.
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Ketabgian, T. (2017). Learning Through Victorian Garbage: Disgust and Desire in an Interdisciplinary Capstone Course. In: Cadwallader, J., Mazzeno, L. (eds) Teaching Victorian Literature in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58886-5_2
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