Don Juan: Our Contemporary

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.