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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
An examination of Shakespeare?s use of the supernatural
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3.00 Credits
Selected topics in Renaissance literature.
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3.00 Credits
A study of the nexus between poetry and politics in the 17th Century.
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3.00 Credits
This course will survey Tudor-Stuart drama. A collective Stock Exchange of ideas, as well as, a laboratory of and for the new social relations of agricultural and commercial capitalism, the new professional theater quickly developed a number of innovative genres and provided an outlet for a wide variety of dramatists. Our objective will be to recapture this broad cultural ferment by reading a representative range of plays by Kyd, Marlowe, Jonson, Dekker, Heywood, Beaumont, Chapman, Fletcher, Webster, and Ford. There are no prerequisites, but some familiarity with Shakespeare's major works will be helpful. Students will be asked to do an in-class presentation and write a 25-page research paper.
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3.00 Credits
In the more than forty years that I have been teaching Spenser at Princeton, I have become more and more convinced that one cannot teach him without teaching Virgil, Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso as well. One can do without almost all of Malory; the Faerie Queene makes a single cameo appearance. Therefore the first three weeks of this seminar are devoted to the achievement of Virgil in creating Aeneas, the founder of Rome. As the Middle Ages wear on, other heroes arrive, in particular, the Roland of the Chanson de Roland, that great epic of France. Sometime in the fifteenth century Roland crosses the Alps and takes on a new life and name - Orlando - and becomes the hero of two of the most important romance epics of Italian literature: Boiardo's Orlando inamorato and Ariosto's Orlando furioso. We will end this Italian sojourn reading Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata, his epic on the First Crusade. The rest of the term will be devoted to how Spenser converted this Italian material to his English purposes.
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3.00 Credits
An examination of the question: did religious literature in late Medieval England contribute to the rise of dissent both within the church and society as a whole?
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3.00 Credits
This course will examine Reformation-era devotional prose and poetry in liturgical, political, literary, and theological contexts. We will place special (but not exclusive) emphasis on the development of devotional lyric in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
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3.00 Credits
The aims of this course are both methodological and historical. The methodological part will consist of an introduction to hermeneutics (in a broad sense) as theorized and/or practiced in certain areas of modern continental philosophy. After a brief look at the crucial innovations of Husserl, we shall study carefully chosen extracts (in English translation) of Heidegger: Being and Time and What is Called Thinking, Gadamer: Truth and Method, and Derrida: Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Dissemination in order to illuminate the different (even opposing) ways in which the idea of "hermeneutics" can develop. This general discussion will be combined with specific consideration of the themes of allegory and negativity. The historical part of the course will concentrate on late ancient, patristic, and early medieval readings (Origen: On First Principles, Augustine: On Christian Teaching, Literal Interpretation of Genesis, Proclus: Commentary on Plato's Timaeus). Here, we shall attempt to advance our comprehension of ancient literature by 1. looking for parallels with modern hermeneutic techniques, 2. applying the modern techniques in test cases. The course is intended to be relatively open-ended, i.e., students will be expected to think about the way in which these discussions are internally coherent and also relate to their own areas of interest (which may be elsewhere in philosophy, theology, or literature (Latin or vernacular)). Requirement: one final essay of ca. 20 pp.
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3.00 Credits
A substantial part of the corpus of pre-Conquest British literature, in both Latin and Old English, consists of Lives of saints and related texts (such as calendars, martyrologies, legendaries, miracle tales, litanies, and accounts of relics) concerned with the exploits and exemplary behaviors of holy men and women from late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. In this seminar we'll survey the whole territory with a broad flourish before narrowing in to examine the careers of some of the most accomplished hagiographers writing in England between the eighth and the eleventh century (especially Ælfric, Bede, Byrhtferth, Folcard, Goscelin, and Wulfstan of Winchester). From that point we will narrow in even further to undertake close readings of a core set of texts (Bede's Life of St Cuthbert, Felix's Life of St Guthlac, the Old English Martyrology, and selections from Ælfric's Lives of Saints), and we will give special attention to the literary dimensions of the cults of four prominent native English saints: Cuthbert, Guthlac, Æthelthryth, and Edmund. Requirements include regular reading in Latin and Old English, weekly response papers, a bibliographical essay, and a research paper.
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3.00 Credits
Until the mid-1980s, the Middle Ages was seen as having had no very sophisticated literary theory, no serious engagement with realism and no great interest in the individual; culturally the period was characterized as an era of unquestioning credulity and unmitigated historical pessimism. Twentieth-century critical trends (from New Criticism to Deconstructionism) did little to test the accuracy of these views. New Historicism, a critical approach developed in part from ethnography and which first took Renaissance literary studies in the 80s by storm, offered an alternative methodology for understanding medieval literature in its cultural and ideological contexts. Since then various kinds of historicist and historical approaches have been developed, some intensely historical, and with more recent emphasis on formalism, a return to literary history itself. This course will introduce the students to historicist and literary historical methodologies; texts will range across literary and documentary sources, autobiography, legal and chronicle sources, medieval library catalogues, as well as to some of the problems of textual criticism and manuscript study. We will begin with an examination of both the achievements and the blindspots of "classic" New Historicism, and proceed to a study of more recent approaches that draw upon history. Topics to be discussed will include "self-fashioning," authorial self- representation, political dissent, patronage, scribal and official censorship, nationalism, and the role of women in the rise of a "national" literature. This course will examine Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, Troilus, the most influential of the Canterbury Tales, Wycliffite texts, the fifteenth-century "Piers Plowman Tradition" poems, Hoccleve, Lydgate, the Robin Hood ballads, Margery Kempe, Sir Thomas Malory, the Findern women poets, the Paston women's letters, the `Scottish Chaucerians' (James I, Henryson, and Dunbar), Skelton, Thomas More, John Foxe, and Ann Askew.
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