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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
This course will examine concepts and uses of allegory, focusing primarily on the seminal yet difficult poem, Piers Plowman. Though a significant amount of time will be spent deciphering Langland's dream vision, its complicated textual history, and its place in 14th-century literary production, our focus will always consider the larger implications of Langland's poem for our understanding of allegorical writing more broadly conceived and its place in literary history. Comparisons to allegorical writings by other writers and from other periods will be encouraged. Our study will include readings in theories of allegory from Origen and Hugh of St. Victor to Paul de Man, Walter Benjamin, and Frederic Jameson.
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3.00 Credits
The Exeter Book is the largest collection of Old English poetry to survive in a single manuscript, a tenth-century anthology containing some of the best-known poems in Old English (such as The Wanderer, The Seafarer, Deor, and the Exeter Book riddles) as well as others drawn from multiple literary traditions. We will read as much of this poetry as we can set against the background of the shaping events and concerns of tenth-century England, especially those set in motion by the Benedictine Reform and by contemporary developments in Anglo-Latin and Hiberno-Latin literature and Old English prose. A secondary goal of the course will be to introduce students to methods of research in several of the disciplines essential to the study of Old English poetry, including the liturgy, hagiography, eschatology, cosmology, biblical exegesis, mythology, and folklore of the early medieval West. A basic reading knowledge of Old English will be essential.
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3.00 Credits
You pick up a copy of Shakespeare - but what is the object you are holding? This course will explore the history, theory and practice of editing Shakespeare as an example of the complex issues in editing literary/dramatic texts. From the work of early modern printers, through the tradition of 18th century editions (Rowe to Malone), towards current, 21st century editorial practice and the future of online/print editions, we will investigate how practice has shaped theory and vice versa. In particular, we will be concerned with the problematics of the representation of performance (early, recent, possible) in text/paratext/commentary. Work required will include editing segments of Shakespeare plays (generating text, collation, commentary), attending performance(s) as well as experimenting with possible new ways in which a Shakespeare edition might be conceived and, of course, writing a substantial research paper.
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3.00 Credits
A study of Pythagorean tradition in the Middle Ages using both philosophical-theological and music-theoretical texts.
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3.00 Credits
Even Richard II, the king under whom literary giants like Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, and the Pearl Poet produced their mature works, owned no books in English. When he was deposed in 1399, English literary texts were still a minority interest among the educated, the majority as yet preferring to read in Latin or French. This was to change dramatically within a generation. This course traces the rise of English as a "national" literature (a literature read across England, in colonial Ireland and lowlands Scotland) by uncovering the reading circles that nurtured it. From its Early Middle English beginnings through the "Alliterative Revival," to the now famous London reading circles at the turn of the century, the course follows the trajectory of "the Long Fourteenth Century." Beginning with selections from Early Middle English works that continued to be actively read after 1300, such as Ancrene Wisse, Layamon's Brut, the Arundel Bestiary, and moving on to early fourteenth century masterpieces like the Harley Lyrics, the "Kildare" Poems, and the key romances of the Auchinleck manuscript, the course will attempt to link these achievements to the Ricardian "Golden Age" they heralded. By considering the less studied works of the late Edwardian era (such as The Chorister's Lament, Winner and Waster, Julian's Short Text, and the strange, abbreviated version of Piers Plowman known as "Z"), the course will provide a fuller historical context for Ricardian London reading circles. It will conclude with works by the Pearl Poet, a selection of some of Chaucer's "most English" poetry, and new women writers from the London Charterhouse. In particular, we will examine the role that the legal community, the civil service, and the pastorate played in the early development of post-Conquest English, its relations with the literature of the "French in England," and the trilingual contexts of the book production. Other key topics will include court culture, authorial self- representation, social and political dissent, and literary colonialism. We will look at various historicist approaches to the study of regional and developing reading communities, along with aspects of medieval literary theory and newer methodologies, such as the history of book culture. The course will involve a good deal of close reading of earlier and more difficult English prior to Chaucer's.
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3.00 Credits
Consideration of poetic constructions of Nature (an idea of order) and nature (the unbuilt environment) in English and American poetry from Andrew Marvell, Alexander Pope, and James Thomson to Ted Hughes, Densise Levertov, and Gary Snyder. Other poets may include Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, John Clare, Emily Dickinson, G.M. Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, Robinson Jeffers, Wallace Stevens, Ted Hughes, Maxine Kumin, Seamus Heaney, Adrienne Rich, and Pattiann Rogers. Ecocritical readings from works by Jonathan Bate, Lawrence Buell, Dana Phillips, and others.
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3.00 Credits
Even though there was no clearly defined concept of "the Church Fathers" until late in the Anglo-Saxon period (with the regular designation of Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory as the four great Latin patres coming into vogue only late in the eleventh century), English scholars from Archbishop Theodore onward made a concerted effort to acquire a thorough command of early Latin ecclesastical literature. Old English and Anglo-Latin literature are consequently profoundly indebted to the writings of many Church Fathers, and there are many cases of patristic texts that were more intensively studied in England than anywhere else in medieval Europe. This course will undertake a survey of the patristic literature known in Anglo-Saxon England, culminating in a focused study of the Old English translations of Augustine's Soliloquies and Gregory's Dialogues. Requirements include regular reading in Latin and Old English, weekly response papers, a bibliographical essay and oral report, and a research paper.
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3.00 Credits
This cross-disciplinary graduate seminar surveys some of the major primary texts, ideas, and events in the transatlantic culture of England and British America. These years witness a set of sweeping transformations sometimes bundled together under the sign of "modernity" in this course,we consider the ways in which emergent concepts of racial identity, political belonging, constitutional law and political economy are mediated in the domains of literary, theatrical, and political culture. Writers will include Hobbes, Locke, Sidney, Dryden, Marvell, Selden, Behn, Tompson, Addison, Defoe, Hume, Equiano, Jefferson, Wheatley, Paine, Burke; secondary readings will be drawn from the work of scholars and theorists such as J.G.A. Pocock, Steve Pincus, Reinhard Koselleck, Hans Blumenburg, Jonathan Sheehan, David Armitage, Joseph Roach, NIcholas Hudson, Paul Gilroy, Kathleen Wilson, Michael McKeon, Laura Brown, and others. The seminar welcomes early modern specialists and nonspecialists alike.
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3.00 Credits
Close analysis of the novel as a genre in the early modern period.
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3.00 Credits
This course deals with the body's fearful and fascinated consciousness of change in relation to organic and inorganic beings. In short stories and novels we see the development of relations with animals, ghosts, fairies, demons, angels and goblins. But the human or humanoid can also identify itself with an inanimate object, or even merge with it. Compelling clutter abounds. "Character" becomes a questionable concept as beasts, material objects and spirits become quasi-humanoid. The course reading centers in the late 18th and 19th century, but we start with The Golden Ass, that profoundly influential novel written by a North African member of the Roman empire who offers us a destabilizing fiction of metamorphosis, a story exhibiting the instability of all sorts of boundaries and classes, including formal boundaries between human and animal. Theoretical material includes work by Freud and Darwin, as well as commentary by Bakhtin, Todorov, de Certeau, and Haraway, but it is nowhere assumed that the critics are superior to the novelists and story-writers, who are also powerful theorists in their own way.
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