The 2006-2007 EMC theme is “Making Publics, 1500-1800.” We hope to explore “publics” as forms of voluntary communities built on the shared interests, tastes, and desires of individuals. Such micro communities coalesce around certain practices, areas of interest, and forms of publication and/or performance. This theme confronts the relationship between publics and the broader social/political field of early modern Europe as well as the emergence of the ideal of the public as a feature of modern political culture. “Making Publics, 1500-1800” asks questions about publics as problematic phenomena, exploring the conditions and dynamics surrounding their emergence and formation.
This theme highlights the EMC’s participation in “Making Publics: Media, Markets, and Association in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700.” This interdisciplinary and international project centered at McGill University aims to, in the words of the project team, “develop an innovative and potentially transformative approach to the history of early modernity.”
Each year the Early Modern Center and its affiliates organize a number of exciting courses and events around the yearly theme. Several early modern graduate and undergraduate courses will be in dialogue with the year’s theme. The EMC will host a Fall colloquium on the theme, a “Making Publics” Winter Conference, as well a Spring undergraduate conference showcasing students’ work from participating courses throughout the year.
2006-2007 Events
Theme-Related Courses
Fall 2006
ENGL 114 | Women and Literature (Undergraduate)
This course will explore the idea and history of “women’s writing” in relation to the early modern print market and notions about publicity, domesticity, professionalism, and educational privilege that are still with us today. We will read poetry, fiction, prose, drama, and letters by 17th- and 18th-c. writers, including Astell, Behn, Finch, Montagu, Philips, and Scott, along with current scholarship on these writers and their contexts. Individual seminars will focus on representations of the female body and codes of femininity; female communities and utopias; satiric representations of women; debates on female education and authorship; the “consumer revolution”; and literary canon formation (who decides what is worth reading?) – then and now.
ENGL 197 | Upper-Division Seminar: The Unread Shakespeare (Undergraduate)
We’ll begin this course by choosing eight plays by Shakespeare that no one (or nearly no one) in the class has read. We will then spend a week on each of them with a final week for a mini-conference on the papers you will by then be writing. In addition to the term paper, there will be very brief position papers each week on the play for that week and a 90 minute final exam. The premises for the course are that every one of Shakespeare’s plays will reward our attention and that even an accidental collection of them will reveal valuable and interesting patterns we would otherwise not have expected. I’ve taught the course several times now, and so far he’s never let us down!
ENGL 231 | Studies in Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare (Graduate)
The goal of this course is to provide an approach to Shakespearean studies at the graduate level through a study of ten Shakespeare plays generally termed “tragedies”: Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Timon of Athens, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. Most of our time will be spent grappling with the details of these complex texts, but during the seminar we will also attempt to touch upon such topics as Shakespeare’s use of sources, Elizabethan rhetoric, Elizabethan stage practices, the stage histories of Shakespeare’s plays, the printing of Shakespeare’s texts and the formation of the Shakespearean canon, the history of Shakespearean criticism and scholarship, modern editing and textual criticism, and Shakespeare on film. All students, including those not taking this course for credit, will be expected to attend every class and to participate actively in discussion. Writing requirements will include a brief (1-2 page) paper each week on the assigned reading for that week and a 10-12 page research paper either on the relationship of one of the plays to its source material or some other topic related to the issues of the course.
ENGL 265 | Seminar in Special Topics : New Approaches to Media History and Criticism: Editing “The Wandering Jew’s Chronicle” (Graduate)
This course combines the study of early-modern cheap printed media with modern digital textual scholarship. “The Wandering Jew’s Chronicle” is a song-ballad of the monarchy of England, printed forms of which survive in eleven broadside and other cheap versions dating from 1630 to 1830. Each version relates the succession of the throne of England, starting in 1066 and cumulative to each time of publication. The versions are often illustrated with woodcuts and are characteristic of the period’s typographical development. One broadside version has previously been digitized by the UCSB Pepys Ballad Archive; this course will complement ongoing, interdisciplinary research into Early-Modern ballads at UCSB and extend it chronologically and thematically. The first quarter will survey appropriate readings in book history and print culture, including oral and visual communication; typography and other aspects of the material text; the development of the ballad trade; and the history of ballad collecting, editing and study. The second quarter will intensively study the ballad itself, preparing it for textual criticism and digital publication. We will scan images and transcribe text from all surviving versions, collating their variants. A single, edited version that documents the text’s complete variants will be the theoretical goal of the project, as will a version or versions suitable for performance or reading. Specialized digital humanities software will be critically assessed for our purposes. The project will, for the first time, make available all versions of the ballad, together with appropriate critical apparatuses and commentaries, through online publication. We will also study the ballad’s place within early-modern historical and political thought, through readings in nationalism, cultural theory and historiography. The first quarter provides an historical introduction to the ballad form [English 231: English Broadside Ballads, 1500-1800 Patricia Fumerton, Winter 2007] as well as an introduction to the project phase. This course will run half-time, meeting alternate weeks, over Fall 2006 and Winter 2007; students may audit the Fall quarter only.
ENGL 265 | New Approaches to Media History and Criticism (Graduate)
“The Wandering Jew’s Chronicle” is a chronological ballad published between 1630 and 1830 in at least ten broadsides and two chapbooks. Each version relates the succession of the throne of England between 1066 and that version’s date of publication. One broadside version has previously been digitized by the UCSB Early Modern Center’s English Ballad Archive; this project will digitise the remainder One broadside version has previously been digitized by the UCSB Pepys Ballad Archive; this course will complement ongoing, interdisciplinary research into Early-Modern ballads at UCSB and extend it chronologically and thematically. The first quarter will survey appropriate readings in book history and print culture, including oral and visual communication; typography and other aspects of the material text; the development of the ballad trade; and the history of ballad collecting and study. In the second quarter we will intensively study the ballad itself, preparing it for textual criticism and digital publication. We will scan images and transcribe text from all surviving versions, collating their variants. A single, edited version that documents the text’s complete variants will be the theoretical goal of the project, as will a version or versions suitable for performance or reading. Specialized digital humanities software will be critically assessed for our purposes. The project will ultimately make available all versions of the ballad, together with appropriate critical apparatuses and commentaries, through online publication. We will also study the ballad’s place within early-modern historical and political thought, through readings in nationalism, cultural theory and historiography. The first quarter provides an historical introduction to the ballad form [English 231: English Broadside Ballads, 1500-1800 Patricia Fumerton, Winter 2007] as well as an introduction to the project phase. This course will run half-time, meeting alternate weeks, over Fall 2006 and Winter 2007; students may audit the Fall quarter only.
Winter 2007
ENGL 162 | Milton (Undergraduate)
Milton wrote his major poems to provide readers with imaginative experiences through which they would come to know themselves and God aright, and thereby acquire the moral and political knowledge, the virtue, and the wisdom that would secure them inner freedom, outward liberty, and an understanding of the sources of their own happiness and misery. Our job in this course will be to undergo a literary experience that is answerable to Milton’s poetic and spiritual aims in his major works and most especially in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. To this end we’ll engage in a close reading of his two most important poems, but also read enough of his earlier poetry and prose to make ourselves conversant with Milton’s emerging poetic ambitions and with the language and the political and theological issues of the time, so we can be fit readers of his poems, able to understand them from the perspective of seventeenth century readers as well as our own. The class will be conducted largely as a workshop in which we interrogate the texts and our readings of them and work on passages and scenes that puzzle and confuse us. We’ll also write several short exploratory papers and one longer paper inquiring into some problem of particular interest to us in Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained.
ENGL 231 | Studies in Renaissance Literature: English Broadside Ballads, 1500-1800 (Graduate)
Note: Attendance in Giles Bergel’s Fall Colloquium (which meets every other week, Wed. 11-1:30 pm), titled “New Approaches to Media History and Criticism,” is highly recommended as preparation for this winter grad course described below. We will study the culture of the most published and most read of literary forms in early modern England: the broadside ballad. In the first half of the course, we will situate ballads within their historical, political, social, and aesthetic contexts. We will read a sampling of ballads of the period together with critical works about them, and consider the kinds of persons who wrote and published ballads, as well as the nature of ballad music (tunes and refrains), formal features of the ballads (woodblock images, black-letter print, meter), practices of circulation, and some recurrent themes popular in the period. In the second half of the course, we shall enter workshop mode, focusing on reading, analyzing, and mounting online transcriptions of an citations for some of the 1,857 ballads in the important Samuel Pepys collection. As part of this “hands on” approach, excursions to the UCSB library and to the Huntington library will be offered. The workshop part of the course will involve students in the Early Modern Center’s ongoing enterprise to create an unprecedented English Ballad Archive, 1500-1800, funded by the NEH, beginning with the ballads collected by Pepys. REQUIREMENTS: Regular attendance and participation. 1) for students relatively new to ballad study (those who did not take my ballad course in Fall 2004: one oral report (5-10 minutes) on a group of ballads we have read for the day; 10 ballad transcriptions (or comparable work on the Pepys ballad project, such as completing full citations for 10 ballads, checking ballad transcriptions and citations, or, for the courageous, singing and recording ballad songs); and a research essay (10 pages in length). 2) for continuing students from the Fall 2004 ballad course: one oral report (5-10 minutes) on the topic of ballad culture you have been investigating (as well as a short written essay, on the subject); also, reading all the ballads in the Pepys category you have been assigned and writing another short essay about them. Essays should be 4-6 pages. The second essay may be submitted at the end of spring quarter.
Spring 2007
ENGL 197 | Upper-Division Seminar: Early Modern Romance (Undergraduate)
In Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the Knight of La Mancha famously loses himself in romances, heroic tales of amorous intrigues and knightly adventures. Why were these tales of knights and dragons, wizards and women warriors – these tales that Cervantes lovingly skewers – so immensely popular in the early modern period? How did these imagined worlds reflect, refract, or simply disregard the real world that readers of romance inhabited? In this course we will read a selection of romances, focusing primarily but not exclusively on the forms the genre takes in early modern England. Our goal will be to attend to the kinds of cultural work that the genre of romance performs. Topics of discussion will include the functions of genre; the power of nostalgia; the politics of gender; the ethics of representing violence; and the problem of justice. After getting our feet wet with selections from Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid, we will turn to texts such as Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and Wroth’s Urania.
ENGL 231 | Studies in Renaissance Literature: The Faerie Queene (Graduate)
In this course we will read Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene in its entirety. Our goal will be to attend to the ways in which Spenser’s epic is responsive both to literary tradition and to the pressing concerns of the historical moment in which it was written. Topics of discussion will include epic, romance, and genre theory; allegory and Christian hermeneutics; iconoclasm and literary form; representations of gender; erotic language and sexual desire; ethnography and the project of empire; and England’s presence in Ireland and the New World.
ENGL 232 | Studies in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature: Libertine Literature and Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Graduate)
We study and discuss a variety of works (poetry, drama, short and long fiction) relating to “libertinism,” a complex early modern cultural movement characterized by religious skepticism, resistance to political and religious authority, flouting of middle-class social conventions, disregard of moral constraint, violence against urban authority, and promotion of a varied and hedonistic sensualism (including male and female bi-sexuality), among other traits. We shall test the argument (advanced by James G. Turner) that libertinism was not a single cultural entity with different facets, but three distinct movements of thought comprising religious, philosophical, and sexual libertinism. We shall begin with Milton’s representation of sexual relations in Paradise Lost, esp books 4, 5, 8, and 9, then move on to other works of the English Restoration, including Behn’s The Fair Jilt, Wycherley’s The Country Wife, and the poems of Rochester. We shall also read English translations of the “big three” French libertine prepornographic classics, The School of Venus (1680), Venus in the Cloister (1725), and A Dialogue Between a Married Lady and a Maid (1740), as well as an important early 18c medical treatise on sexuality and venereal disease, all available in When Flesh Becomes Word (2004). The course will conclude with an exploration of libertinism in Defoe’s Roxana, Richardson’s Pamela, Fielding’s Shamela and Joseph Andrews, and Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Fanny Hill). One ten page term paper, some in-class writing, and discussion. Reader discretion strongly advised.
Links
Making Publics: Media, Markets, and Association in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700.