Don Juan: Our Contemporary (ENGL40018)

In 1881, the Victorian arbiter of culture and anarchy, Matthew Arnold, declared that Lord Byron’s “hour of irresistible vogue has passed away.” This subject explores how, on the contrary, the enduring hour of Byron’s Don Juan is—still—irresistibly now. A serial text, first published in 1819-1824, Don Juan appeared in a Romantic moment that invented contemporaneity as an historical category, and its vitality lives on in our contemporary moment. Working through the poem’s 17 cantos, the subject offers students an immersive experience of Byron’s mixed-genre masterpiece—the ur-text and primal event of modern literary scandal and experimentation. With much of the experimentation we think of as now, Don Juan was already there: generic hybridity; “truth in masquerade;” spectacularly unreliable narrators; the public intimacies of celebrity culture and its secular recasting of divinity; abyssal reflexivity; surface reading; paranoid reading; superheroic Satanism; queer vicariousness and its play of identifications; preposterous liberalisms; and the performative refusal to observe appropriate boundaries between life and text.

We engage Don Juan not only in context but as context for understanding the emergence of global modernity in the wake of Napoleonic Europe; the revolutionary politics of the Italian Carbonari; libertine sexuality and romantic love; colonial transportation and the criminal subcultures of the “flash.” We examine how Don Juan travels backwards and forwards, from then to now, tracking its Romantic reworking of the Enlightenment rediscovery of classical Epicureanism, Virgil and Homer and Dante’s Inferno; the world-literary intertexts of Tirso de Molina, Calderón, Góngora and Molière, and Mozart’s Don Giovanni; and its endurance in Victorian Gothic heroes, Baudelaire and Belle Epoque Decadence, Oscar Wilde, Dolly Wilde, Jane DeLynn’s Don Juan in the Village and Dorothy Porter; to popular-cultural avatars such as David Bowie, Patti Smith, Morrissey and Marvel superhero Tony Starke/Ironman.