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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
This course examines the various revolutions that reshaped British literature and culture between the 1790s and 1830s, chiefly in response to the French Revolution. We will explore a wide range of works in diverse genres as they address three major areas of interest: the rights of man and woman (including the rights of slaves); the scientific and industrial revolutions; and the development of a new aesthetics (including ideas about language, style, imagination, and the role of the writer). We will tend to study these works in pairs or clusters to highlight differences of approach and emphasize the importance of dialogue and debate to Romantic creativity-the many ways that writers responded to each other and to their cultural and historical circumstances. The best-known poets of the age - Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Byron - will figure alongside some of their most innovative and influential contemporaries, including Edmund Burke, Tom Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, John Thelwall, Charlotte Smith, William Hazlitt, and Mary Shelley. The course will take stock of key critical perspectives on these writers while honing your skills in analysis and argumentation. Instances of contemporary visual art and propaganda will help broaden our understanding of this profoundly revolutionary period in British literature and culture.
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3.00 Credits
On January 16,1599, a hearse borne by poets wound its way through London to Westminster Abbey, their burden destined for burial in a tomb adjacent to Geoffrey Chaucer's in what is now known as Poet's Corner. Once there, the poets who attended the body threw elegies for the dead poet, along with their pens and their tears, into the grave. The deceased, a former scholarship boy whose contemporaries came to call him the `prince of poets', was not Shakespeare nor Donne but Edmund Spenser. Celebrated in his own day, influential for writers as varied as John Keats and C.S. Lewis, Spenser achieved much: a cheeky pastoral poem that announced an obscure twenty-seven-year old as England's new Vergil, an innovative sonnet sequence that departed from gendered norms in striking ways, and, most importantly, The Faerie Queene, a romance epic both dazzlingly learned and delightfully ludic. Our reading assignments will include selections from Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar and Amoretti; our main emphasis will be The Faerie Queene itself. Its range of characters, including a cross-dressed female knight and the first robot in English literature, and of literary forms, such as saints' lives, Ovidian myth, Arthurian legend, and Greek romance, invites its readers to reflect on questions concerning moral and political philosophy, gender and sexuality, faith and misbelief, and much else. Because of its intense, self-reflexive focus on interpretive practices and its insistence on working by induction, through interpretive trials and errors, the poem has occupied a central place in literary criticism from C.S. Lewis to Northrop Frye to Stephen Greenblatt. A good reader of The Faerie Queene promises to be a good reader of much else: the poem still serves as a laboratory for critical innovations in literary scholarship today. It is an excellent training ground for English majors as well as would-be knights (cross-dressed or otherwise). Course assignments will likely include a reader's theatre presentation of a passage from the poem, short response papers, one longer paper written in several installments, and a final exam.
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3.00 Credits
An exploration of different visions of live in 16th- and 17th-century poetry and narrative, focusing on the social, religious, and political demands that complicated love relationships.
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3.00 Credits
Late medieval writers operated in a world distressed by social injustice, political oppression and church controversy. Although this period saw the rise of modern English literature itself, it was also a time when starving peasants rebelled against their overlords, knights rode off on crusade amidst anti-war critique, English translations of the Bible were suppressed, women mystics struggled to be heard amidst gender prejudice, and the king Chaucer worked for was deposed and murdered. This course will examine how the major writers of late medieval England negotiated these troubled waters, writing sometimes candidly and sometimes secretly about dangerous or disturbing matters. Authors to be studied will include Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, the Wakefield Master playwright, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and Marguerite Porete (the only medieval woman author to have been burned at the stake for her writings). The aim is to help illuminate how literary writers sought to defend or enlarge their religious or political orthodoxies in response to the challenges of the time.
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3.00 Credits
Using Milton as a guide, close readings of Hobbes and Spinoza.
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3.00 Credits
This course will look at masterworks originally written in Ireland's first language, the oldest vernacular literature of northern Europe. We'll look at the stories from the Ulster Cycle, including the most famous love story in Irish (a.k.a. "Deirdre of the Sorrows"), tales of kings acting badly, heroes astounding others before the age of 10, and the great Irish epic the Táin Bó Cúailnge ("The Cattle Raid of Cooley"), which tells a rollicking good story (body-morphing battle frenzy! treachery! jokes! boasting! tricolored hair!) while tackling confounding social and political concerns (such as the dangers of chaos, jealousy, arrogance, and what you do with a bunch of overheated, underemployed young men). We'll next look at the poetic tradition in Irish between approximately 1540 and 1800, an era when England, later Britain, consolidates its conquest and colonization of the country. In this context, writers craftily defend Irish culture, manhood and authority while recalibrating Irish identity, sometimes in deadly earnest, sometimes by making fun of what they cannot necessarily change. All materials will be read in English translation.
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3.00 Credits
This course uses Shakespeare as the focal point for an inquiry into the relationship between literature and political theory, broadly understood. We will read a range of plays across the major genres-- The Merchant of Venice, Richard II, Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Othello, Cymbeline, The Tempest-- in order to consider how Shakespeare manages the following topics: the tension between retribution and the rule of law, the nature of political community and the limits of pluralism, the emergent idea of the nation, the limits of human dignity and the political character of the household. We will thicken our inquiry by pairing a few of the plays with contemporary legal or literary works: Othello with Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North, Measure for Measure with Lawrence v. Texas (2004), The Merchant of Venice with R. vs. JFS School (2009), The Tempest with Shakespeare Behind Bars. Course text will be The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, eds. Orgel and Braunmuller.
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3.00 Credits
England witnessed an explosion of religious poetry during the seventeenth century, one of the most turbulent periods in England's religious history. The devotional poems written in this period express a wide variety of attitudes toward salvation, toward divine love, and toward the Church:: a longing for salvation, a fear of damnation, a deep desire to feel God's love and approval, and a turbulent vacillation between despair and ecstatic praise. Paradoxically, this poetry reacted against older models of courtly poetry and profane love at the same time as it was deeply indebted to those models. In addition, the religious debates and battles of the Reformation were far from resolved in this period: English Catholics and Protestants produced poetry that offered praise and sacrifice to God while often simultaneously criticizing the beliefs of their Christian opponents. Hence, this course examines seventeenth-century poetry through two major lenses: the conflicts and tensions between "sacred" and "profane" poetry, and the divisions and complications between Catholic and Protestant religious identities as created or expressed in that poetry. How does religious identity shape poetic devotion toward God? What is the effect of different conceptions of the Church on religious poetry of this period? To what extent do the categories of sacred and secular overlap, complement, complicate, or antagonize one another? And what are the possible relationships between devotional poetry, the English nation, and religious identities? To explore these questions, this course includes (among others) the works of major figures like John Donne, George Herbert, John Milton, and Andrew Marvell, as well as the poems of previously neglected Catholic poets like St. Robert Southwell, William Alabaster, and John Beaumont.
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3.00 Credits
Although the period between Chaucer and St. Thomas More saw the rise of modern English literature as we know it, it was also a period of severe social injustice, political oppression, church controversy and even martyrdom. Starving peasants rebelled against their overlords, knights rode off on crusade amidst anti-war critique, English translations of the Bible were suppressed by church authorities, women writers struggled to be heard amidst gender prejudice, and the king Chaucer worked for was deposed and murdered. This course will examine how the major writers of late medieval and early Tudor England negotiated these troubled waters, writing sometimes candidly and sometimes secretly about dangerous or disturbing matters. Authors to be studied will include Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, Christine de Pizan, Margery Kempe, Sir Thomas Malory, William Tyndale, Anne Askew and St. Thomas More, as well as the anonymous ballads of Robin Hood. Topics to be discussed will include: knighthood, visionary writing, attitudes toward women's learning and teaching, Jews and Muslims, emerging struggles for intellectual freedom, parliamentary rights and free speech, the Peasants Rising of 1381, and the rise of dissent.
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3.00 Credits
A survey of medieval literature, excluding Chaucer.
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