Graduate Courses – The Early Modern Center

Graduate courses are listed by year, from Fall through Spring quarters.

2020-2021

Fall 2020

ENGL 231 | Women, Race, and Writing in the Early Modern Period

Content of course will vary from quarter to quarter.

ENGL 595P | The Building of Benjamin Franklin Press, Online and in Maker Lab,

This course will consist of a mostly online colloquium that will extend over two quarters, fall ’20 and winter ’21, for 4 sessions during each quarter, meeting on Tuesdays at 9 am to 11:30 am. You can petition to have it meet fields I, II, III, and V. The Fall dates for meetings are: Oct. 6 and 20, Nov. 10 and Dec. 8. Each quarter’s meetings will together earn students 4 units, for the equivalent, when taken together, of 1 course credit. The colloquium sessions are preparatory to the voluntary, not-for-credit building of a “Common” or “Franklin” wooden pull-press (c. 1750), which we will begin working on in the late winter but focus on (outside class) in the spring quarter ‘21. The colloquium series will also be advantageous (though not required) as preparation for the spring ‘21 graduate course, Eng. 236: “The History and Making of Print” (co-taught, Prof. Patricia Fumerton and famed 18th c. historian Prof. Tim Hitchcock, Univ. of Sussex, UK, who will be in residence at UCSB in the spring). The colloquium series is capped at 6 grads (beyond that cap, on petition to the instructor), so that community members can also participate, and so we can also spend some time, likely in the winter quarter, in person in the Maker Lab, while observing social distancing (Fumerton is director of the ML, which is a fully-equipped printing press studio). The grad course in the spring will be capped at 12 students to allow for safety and full hands-on participation in the Maker Lab.

The fall quarter colloquium sessions will first situate the colloquium within the “History of the Book” and the new “Maker Movement.” In this context, we will address the value of practice-based research. We will then turn to an overview of the impact of the history of the printing press. Focus will be especially on the “invention” of the letterpress printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440, and subsequent innovations introduced to that press’s construction by makers of the “Common Press” used during the 17th and 18th centuries in England and the US (also known as the “Franklin Press” because Benjamin Franklin trained on such a press in England and set up his own printing press studio in the US featuring a Common Press). We will further learn to identify the commonly named “body” parts of old-style pull presses and moveable typeface and interrogate the cultural implications of such terminology.

The winter quarter colloquium will begin by tracking the evolution of the printing press as more like a circle, or spiral, of print history. We will, in particular, focus on how modern technology and even vocabulary are not only modeled on “old-style” printing presses and composing practices but also how the basic elements of the latest computer 3D CAD software can allow one to create (and understand how such creation happens), making a models of early modern printing presses and actual typefaces. Provided with a full set of 3D small-scale and plastic press parts for building a miniature Franklin press, each student will also learn to assemble a model press as well as to disassemble and reassemble it, as was done in the period of the wooden press, when printing was highly movable. Finally, students will keep their own final assembled model as a memento of their new insights gained into the making behind the printed word.

Winter 2021

ENGL 595P | The Building of Benjamin Franklin Press, Online and in Maker Lab,

Instructor: Professor Patricia Fumerton

Spring 2021

ENGL 595P | The Building of Benjamin Franklin Press, Online and in Maker Lab,

Instructor: Professor Patricia Fumerton

2019-2020

Fall 2019

ENGL 231 | Shakespeare’s Feelings

Instructor: Professor James Kearney

In this course we will consider Shakespeare’s feelings, or rather the emotional and affective relations and events, moods and experiences he conjures for his audiences on the early modern stage. Our discussions will touch on everything from the ancient rhetorical tradition of ethopoeia to contemporary affect theory as we address the various affective technologies Shakespeare employs. Embracing the enabling limits of the quarter system, we will read only a few of Shakespeare’s plays: King Lear, Timon of Athens, Twelfth Night, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, maybe Hamlet. Our reading will also take up the history of emotions – as well as what it means that emotions have a history – with a particular focus on the relation of reason to the passions. As we approach this history, we will attend to the thought of figures such as Aristotle and Seneca, Thomas Wright and David Hume. We will also discuss more recent interventions in thought concerning emotion, including those of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Brian Massumi, Sara Ahmed, and Sianne Ngai as we discuss topics ranging from the passion of the player to anger and stoicism, from the affective space of the stage to mourning, melancholy, and the experience of empathy.

2018-2019

Fall 2018

ENGL 231 | Renaissance Literature and Globalization

This course engages with the theories and histories of global empire articulated in English tracts and translations from the turn of the sixteenth century through the early seventeenth century. It also examines how these theories and histories were translated to the English stage, which was the primary medium for disseminating ideologies and information to a popular audience. Belated with respect to the most powerful empires of the “Greater Western World” (historian Daniel Goffman’s term) – the Spanish Hapsburg and the Turkish Ottoman – England was considered a “proto-imperial” and “proto-orientalist” nation, meaning its leading merchants and courtiers aspired to empire even as their colonial efforts outside the British Isles were tentative and largely unsuccessful. Examining English articulations of imperial desires on the page and stage consequently foregrounds alternative approaches to globalization, including critiques, challenges, and subversions, even as it points towards the hegemonic model that will subtend the British imperial project in subsequent centuries. This course thus aims to provide a comprehensive theoretical, literary, and historical foundation for students interested in discourses of global empire, particularly in the Anglophone tradition, from the early modern period to the present.

Topics we will cover include:

“Proto-Globalization”: Globalization Theory and the Early Modern Period
Mapping the Early Modern Globe
Columbus and China
More’s Utopia and the Idea of America
Las Casas and the Black Legend
Trade, Colonialism, and Empire
Masques of Blackness and Early Modern Race-Thinking
Dramatizing the Christian-Muslim Mediterranean

ENGL 231 |Early Modern Political Thought, Practice, and Performance

The execution of Charles I on 30 January 1649 was, as Derek Hirst argues, the greatest theatrical and political spectacle of the seventeenth century. On the scaffold in a brief but elaborately choreographed display, questions central to modern state politics were asked and, temporarily, answered. What is the nature of the state? What agencies guarantee, ratify, or legitimate the state’s constitution? What is the relation between the apparatus of the state and the “will” or “freedom” of the governed? Does the field of politics include (by incorporating or emerging from) the home and the workshop – the oikos? How do justice, reason, nature, tradition, and providence fit in the constitution of the state? How does the law relate to the sovereign? Was James VI/I correct when insisting that “kings are the authors and makers of the laws and not the laws of the kings”? Were constitutionalists such as Edward Coke correct that if laws existed prior to sovereigns, then sovereign power must be drawn from an antecedent, superseding consent by which sovereigns were bound?

While these questions – and specific answers to these questions – constellate around the body of Charles, this class assumes that they have fraught prehistories and also that these prehistories intersect with the politically-minded drama of the seventeenth century being produced by playwrights profoundly attuned to the philosophical and theological discussions about the state and the sovereign that would come to a head when Charles lost his. These discussions about the state are not only contexts through which Marlowe and Shakespeare makes sense; rather, they’re fields of debate in which Marlowe and Shakespeare participated as writers for both the public stage and courtly audiences. We assume here that the theatre – censored but popular, written by sophisticated thinkers for more or less sophisticated audiences – engages with debates surrounding questions of political legitimacy and that it does so in a way, like the execution of Charles, that unites representation, meaning, publicity, philosophy, and spectacle.

2017-2018

Fall 2017

ENGL 236 | The History and Making of Print

This is a theoretical, critical, and practical course in print, taught collaboratively by Patricia Fumerton, Department of English, and Harry Reese, Department of Art and Co-Director of Book Arts, CCS. It moves from a short theory and history of print to focus on the practical making of print, from papermaking, to engaging with different typefaces, and setting and printing type. In the second half of the course, students will print a page from an author or genre that is of special interest to their field of study and write a critical paper (6-10 pp.) about how their experience in making their printed artifact produces and interacts with interpretation of the author/field they are focusing on. All students will also participate in a last day display and critique of their made artifact. This course is part of the “maker” movement in the humanities.

Admission to the course is by permission of the instructors. The course will be limited to 6 English and Art graduate students and 6 undergraduates, with priority given to CCS undergrads and then English. Total maximum enrollment for the course: 12 students. Graduate students may apply to the Graduate Committee to have the course count toward the fulfillment of whatever field they focus on in their special project.

2016-2017

Spring 2017

ENGL 232 | Early Modern Political Thought

Building on last year’s ENGL 231, “Modernity and Early Modernity,” this iteration of ENGL 231 explores the modernity of early modern political thought as it appears in early modern English art and philosophy. The seminar will work to better understand our own nominally “modern” political settlement by exploring its central categories — citizenship, subjection, representation, secularity, popularity — and by asking how these categories were operating between the end of the sixteenth century and the end of the seventeenth century, or at the moment when the modern world is often said to “emerge” in England. To this end, we will explore the work of republican and proto-republican philosophers (Hobbes, Bacon, Machiavelli, Buchanan), the work of propagandists (Charles I, Milton), and the work of politically sophisticated artists (Shakespeare, Marlowe, Cavendish, Dekker, Lanyer). The seminar will also engage with current debates around periodization, democracy, authority, consent, and dissent.

Winter 2017

ENGL 236 | Ephemera, 1550 to Present

Riding the recent wave of studies in ephemera that has swept across humanities disciplines as an extension of the turn to the object as both a thing and a moment in time, this course will study a selection of ephemera from 1550 to the present. The objects of study are necessarily selectively and subjectively chosen and roughly take us from older to newer forms of ephemera: including, tracts and libels; court masques; broadside ballads; woodcuts and comic strips; newspapers (guest speaker, Rachael King); miscellanies, excerpts, and marginalia (guest speaker: Arthur Marotti); extra-illustrated books (this class includes a trip to the Huntington Library to view some of its famed collection of such books, with guest speaker Lori Anne Ferrell); games, focusing on abandonware and app stores (guest speaker, Jeremy Douglass), and the transitory nature of the world wide web, or “404: Curating Networks” (guest speaker, Alan Liu).

An ongoing question the course will pursue is “what are ephemera?” The Ephemera Project at Rice University defines ephemera as “detritus or garbage that people produce without intending it to survive the moment,” http://chaocenter.rice.edu/ephemera/about.aspx (link is external). Would you agree? What about recycling? What role do hobbyists and collectors play in such a definition and our study of ephemera? Why even produce let alone collect “detritus”? Why do we as cultural literary critics care about the ephemera of any historical period?

FRENCH 232B | Female Patronage in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance: Translation, Adaptation and the Illustrated Book

The shifting shapes, design and dynamics of books and their function in the dissemination of meaning and in the redefinition of authorship, patronage and bookmaking during the transition from manuscript to print have inspired researchers over the last several decades. To better understand the socio-political dynamics of literary creation and transmission and the relationship between a book’s materiality and its content, this graduate seminar will concentrate on the role of female patronage and gift-giving in medieval and Renaissance bookmaking, on the illustrated book as the artistic object shaped and designed with women in mind, and on translation and adaptation as the mode of literary expression that was at once tailored to this female readership and embodied in the book as cultural artifact. Seminars will focus on topics such as the translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Heroides in France, the tradition of the Romance of the Rose, and the enduring influence of Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus, with close examination – thanks to online technology — of the very books written by or for women: those owned by collectors (such as Louise of Savoie and Margaret of Austria), those dedicated to European queens and other nobles (such as Charlotte of Savoie and Anne of Brittany), and those containing well-known texts adapted or translated by female writers (such as Christine de Pizan and Anne de Graville).

2015-2016

Spring 2016

ENGL 231 | Studies in Renaissance Literature: Modernity and Early Modernity
Please *click here* to access the syllabus.

Both intellectually and institutionally, our discipline relies on periodization when dealing with history, philosophy, and art, assuming that the historical period wields substantial interpretive or explanatory power. Taking the period as an object of study rather than an enabling fiction, however, “Modernity and Early Modernity” explores the most influential periodizing assumption in the history of Western thought: that “we” became “modern” somewhere between the 14th and 18th centuries. To explore this imagined historical breach, we will probe the “early modern,” an epoch marked by its fraught relationship to the primary intellectual categories through which Western histories are often imagined. Exploring the impossible relationship between the medieval and the modern that “early modernity” posits, we will work not only to identify the character of early modernity but also to identify the various ways that the category forecloses our understanding of the period under consideration. In doing so, we will regularly ask two key questions posed by Dipesh Chakrabarty in Habitations of Modernity: “Can the designation of something or some group as non- or premodern ever be anything but a gesture of the powerful?” What do we do when we characterize those people “whose life practices constantly challenge our ‘modern’ distinctions between the secular and the sacred, between the feudal and the capitalist, between the nonrational and the rational?”

As implied by Chakrabarty’s questions, the character of modernity is often identified in shifting terms that are imagined to map readily onto one another, as if secular, democratic politics, scientific rationalism, and capitalism are necessarily of a piece. Throughout the course, we will consider these terms individually, in relation to one another, and in terms of their presumed relationship to modernity. To facilitate this project, each week will be dedicated to a single key coordinate in the story told about modernity and the early modern. After the first week during which we will discuss the various histories enabled and foreclosed by stories of modernity, we will explore modern political economy at the dawn of capitalism in England, the various forms of political organization supported and challenged by modern forms of republicanism, and the three forms of social organization most often identified with modernity: the metropolis, the Westphalian nation state, and the “Globe of Nations.” After dealing with questions of political and economic organization, we will explore the implications of scientific and geographical exploration in discussions of modernity and early modernity. We will finish with Hamlet.

Fall 2015

ENGL 231 | Studies in Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare and Phenomenology
Inspired by the Early Modern Center’s 2015-16 theme, “The Phenomenology of Playing,” this course will explore phenomenology in relation to Shakespeare and his theater. Embracing the enabling limits of the quarter system, we will read only four of Shakespeare’s plays – Measure for Measure, Macbeth, The Winter’s Tale, and King Lear – but we will read them well, devoting significant time to each play. Our discussion of phenomenology will extend from the big three of phenomenology’s heyday – Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty – to the emergent field of historical phenomenology as articulated by early modern critics like Bruce Smith and Julia Reinhard Lupton. In our conversations about phenomenology’s attempt to grasp or account for lived experience, we will touch on the phenomenologically-inflected thought of Arendt and Levinas, as well as contemporary attempts to rethink the phenomenological project in relation to body, emotion, and mind. We will discuss topics ranging from the senses and theatrical experience to affective engagement and affordance theory, from cognitive ecologies and extended mind to ethical experience and the demands of community.

2014-2015

Spring 2015

ENGL 231 | Studies in Renaissance Literature: Economic Thought, Early Modern Texts
In this course we will cherry-pick from 2500 years of economic thought in order to consider key economic issues in relation to the literature of early modern England. In our inquiry, we will touch on a variety of thinkers, ranging from Aristotle and Seneca to Locke and Marx, from Nietzsche and Simmel to Graeber and Massumi. As the above list suggests, our foray into economic thought will be unapologetically transhistorical. At the same time, we will attend to the ways in which tracing a genealogy of modern economic concepts transports us to unexpected places in the premodern discursive landscape: moral philosophy, theology, natural history. In our discussions, we will tackle traditional economic concepts like property, debt, labor, and value, but we will also reflect on imaginative world-building, affective epistemologies, and non-human economies. We will consider early modern literary texts such as More’s Utopia, book two of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Jonson’s Volpone, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe as we discuss topics ranging from utopian desire and the disavowal of the economic to affective economies and instrumental reason, from theories of value and money to economic precarity and the anthropology of debt.

ENGL 232 | Studies in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature: The Expanded Epistolary Literature
Jürgen Habermas has argued that the epistle is the preeminently private genre, a quasi-diary in which “the individual unfolded himself in his subjectivity.” Jacques Derrida, meanwhile, has described the letter as “not a genre but all genres, literature itself.” As these influential accounts show, letters can be hard to define; they appear to be both historically specific and universal, both constraining and versatile. While the letter has a long history in literature, beginning at least with Ovid’s Heroides, it was with the expansion and systematization of state postal systems that this old genre exploded into the print public sphere. Almost as soon as there were newspapers, people began writing to their editors, and the first novels also structured themselves as series of letters between characters. This course focuses on the theme of correspondence “examining both fictional and authentic letters” as it became a key basis of literary production for philosophers, historians, journalists, novelists, biographers, and academics in the modern period. Is the letter public or private? Is it a democratic or exclusive genre? And why have such forms of communication proved central to moments of intellectual and disciplinary change? By reading a variety of epistolary genres as well as adopting the epistolary form for some of our critical responses, we will investigate the impact of the letter on concepts of literature, originality, and the self.

Winter 2015

ENGL 231 | Studies in Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Politics

Fall 2014

ENGL 231 | Studies in Renaissance Literature: Sequels and Series – Publishing “The Making of a Broadside Ballad”
This course is designed as a sequel or extension of the course I taught last year in Winter ’14 on early modern ballad culture and popular print. As the students and I explored making ballads in all their materiality, from ourselves making paper broadside sheets in UCSB’s Art Studio, to learning the distinctive tricks that go into ballad writing, to fitting tunes to such texts (with the help of EBBA’s ethnomusicologists), to setting type and printing our own self-created ballads on our own self-created paper at the UC Riverside Print Shop, the entire class (instructor included) underwent a radical discovery. In a major way we came to understand that so much that is involved in the “making” of a printed artifact–especially of a single ballad sheet of printed, illustrated, and (as indicated in the printed tune title) sung text–influences our perception of what ballads “are” and how they would have been received in their own time. So much did our “makings” change our “interpretations,” that we realized we had in a fresh and important way redefined the methods of research on print and material culture. We thus decided to publish our discoveries in a six-issue special series of the Early Modern Center’s emcImprint (a new refereed, online journal produced by the EMC). Co-editing these special issues with myself are Professor Andrew Griffin and Dr. Carl Stahmer (EBBA Associate Director).

ENGL 232 | Studies in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature: Reality and the Novel
For too long we have emphasized Literature’s power to figure, to trope and to construct fantasy. Critics and readers of novels have understood realism as a technique of creating a virtual reality that is not (real). But this ignores the novel’s hold upon reality. It is time to strip the quotes that the linguistic turn in literary studies has put around reality. Only then can we recover how novel writers used fiction to investigate reality. (c.f. Bruno Latour, An Inquiry Into the Modes of Existence) But what, you might well ask, do you mean by reality? That is always a difficult question and must be handled with care. In reading a series of important novels, written between 1605 and 1872, we will read some of the literary theorists of this question (Eric Auerbach; Ian Watt, Bruno Latour). But our main attention will be directed as tracing the strategies by which six writers use novelistic narrative to investigate some aspect of reality. In Don Quixote, Cervantes thematicizes the power of novel-induced belief to displace non-novelistic reality. In Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina the power of fantasy collides with the embodied power of the heroines all too real body. In writing Joseph Andrews “written in imitation of the Manner of Cervantes”, Henry Fielding uses Cervantes’ style to challenge the first person bias and high moral seriousness of Richardson’s Pamela. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy embeds reality in the mental associations that are both free and constrained. In Oliver Twist, Dickens incorporates the dialects and ideolects of London to deliver a withering—and he insists, all too real—exposé of the fate of the orphan in industrializing England. In George Eliot’s “study of provincial life,” the interdependence of the lives, places, intentions and actions in Middlemarch figures reality as a social system as complex as those conceptualized by classics of 19th century sociology (Compt, Weber, Marx).

Miguel de Cervantes: The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, Part I, 1605. (week 1-2) Please use one of the complete Samuel Putnam translations.
Eliza Haywood, Fantomina, 1725 and Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews: Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes [Oxford World Classic, ed. By Douglas Brooks-Davies] (week 3)
Lawrence Sterne: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, 1759 [Norton Critical Edition is recommended, ed. By Howard Anderson] (week 4-5)
Charles Dickens: Oliver Twist: the Parish Boy’s Progress, 1838 [Dover Thrift Edition] (week 6)
George Eliot: Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, 1871-72 [Penguin Classic] (week 7-9)

Requirements: one seminar presentation (on literary text), one seminar presentation (on critical text) and a final term paper. Of course, you must also enjoy reading!

ENGL 232 | Studies in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature: Writing Early Modern Nature

Challenging the truism that “Enlightenment science” divided humans from the natural world, this course traces an early-modern history of environmentalism and environmental ethics, mostly in British contexts. We will explore ethical, historical, aesthetic, scientific, ethnographic, and political questions in a variety of literary genres – along the way engaging critical perspectives from current environmental ethicists/ecophilosophers, literary ecocritics, and post-colonial theorists.

– What did “nature” mean to Europeans in the 17th and 18th centuries, and how was “nature” valued (using “value” in both the affective and economic senses)?
– How did writers imagine human relations with non-human others, and what literary genres did they see as appropriate for exploring these?
– How did Europeans see “nature” as different in the stories they set in circum-Caribbean colonized outposts?
– What did (does) it mean to “speak for” nature?

Our last readings for the quarter will look at how and why later writers have returned to 18th-c. accounts of human/non-human relations.

2013-2014

Fall 2013

ENGL 595BP | Special Graduate Colloquium: The Ballad of the Dissertation
This three-quarter colloquium involves a series of 9 mostly Skype lectures by graduate students and junior scholars of English Literature and History who have incorporated broadside ballads from the 16th to the 19th centuries into their dissertations. Presentations will be informal and designed to answer questions that address generally the challenges of defining the topic and the parameters of a dissertation as well as how introducing popular print changes, enhances or productively “disturbs” one’s perspective. Some presenters who have already filed their dissertations will further address strategies for turning a dissertation into a publishable book.

ENGL 595GE | Special Graduate Colloquium: The Genres of the Long Enlightenment, their Origins and Destinations
For the sake of this colloquium, we’ll use a very broad definition of “genre.” Derived from the French word genre, meaning “kind”, genre came to denote “a particular style or category of work or literary composition, characterized by a particular form, style, or purpose.” (OED) Although the term ‘genre’ was most widely applied to imaginative literary works, for analytical purposes we’ll apply it to the broad Renaissance and Enlightenment sense of literature, as including all the forms of letters and writing for the sake of learning. We focus most of our study upon the long 18th century (1660-1820) because the expansion of print and trade and the institution of literary criticism made this a period when old genres were collected and studied, and new genres and formats of writing were invented and developed.

So for our study, we will select from an open set of genres: genres related to the advancement of knowledge, from the journal article reporting experimental findings to dictionaries and encyclopedia; newspapers and magazines; ballads and ballad collections; systems and essays; musical theater; natural histories; and a host of genres of a more literary kind, from epic, mock epic and georgic to the sentimental and gothic novel. We hope that by ranging across this very broad set of genres we will make headway with questions of historical and theoretical interest: what is a ‘genre’? what role does it play in networking authors and readers and getting them to share common protocols for reading? Is there a law for each genre? Or is it the role of genre to encourage violations of these implicit laws (pace Derrida)? What is the knowledge or entertainment function of a particular genre? How does it enable new networking and communication? How do they stimulate the formation of new communities of reading?

Topics and discussion leaders (UCSB faculty and grad students and selected visitors) – as of now “topics” listed are possible but not yet firm. The rest is set.

Fall 2013:

Warner: on classical literary genres (e.g. Homer or Horace translated by Pope)
Nov 1: Anne Maurseth, UCSB French, The Genres of Enlightenment Chance in Mathematics, Philosophy and Fiction
November 15: Arthur Morotti, Wayne State University, Anthologies
December 6: Elisa Tamarkan, “Relevance and the Newspaper”

Winter 2014

ENGL 231 | Studies in Renaissance Literature: The Makings of Popular Media – Broadside Ballads, 1500-1800
This course will study the evolving culture of the most published and most read of literary forms in early modern England: the broadside ballad. The goal is to understand the printed ballad within its changing aesthetic and historical contexts. In each class, we will read a sampling of ballads from the period in light of critical works that address the following topics: definition (what is a ballad?), formal features (paper and ink; woodcut illustrations), production and dissemination (authors, printers/publishers, and peddlers/chapmen), orality (music and performance), collectors and collecting processes (with a focus on the Crawford collection), and making a digital ballad archive. The course will be in many ways “hands on.” We will make paper as it was made in the 16th and 17th centuries at the UCSB Art Studio, work a printing press at UC Riverside, handle original broadside ballads and woodcuts at the Huntington Library, and both transcribe and make facsimile transcriptions for the English Broadside Ballad Archive in the EMC.

Topics and discussion leaders (UCSB faculty and grad students and selected visitors) – as of now “topics” listed are possible but not yet firm. The rest is set.

Winter 2014:

Warner: on the theory of genre (Derrida and others)
February 14: Elizabeth Cook, UCSB, English “Natural History and Gilbert White”
February 28: Jim Kearney, UCSB, English, “On the Romance”
Topic: Long 18th century collection, curation and criticism of the Renaissance ballad: Pepys, Addison, Gay, Percy, etc.
Jim Kearney & team: on the romance

Spring 2014

Topics and discussion leaders (UCSB faculty and grad students and selected visitors) – as of now “topics” listed are possible but not yet firm. The rest is set.

Spring 2014:

Warner: examples of the morphing and plasticity of genre (e.g. in the ‘rise of the novel,’ the long history of the newspaper)
Topic: The invention of the genre of the gothic: from Walpole to Lewis’s The Monk
May 9: Deidre Lynch, U. of Toronto, The Commonplace Book (or the Essay)

2012-2013

Fall 2012

ENGL 231 | Studies in Renaissance Literature: Early Modern Risk
Inspired by the “Speculative Risk” programming of last year, this course will pursue the topic of risk in early modern England. In most contemporary discussions of the topic, risk is correlated with modernity. In this course we will address the emergence of some modern conceptions of risk in early modern economic practice and political theory. We will also explore premodern cognates to the notion of risk in concepts like chance and hazard, contingency and calculation, uncertainty and exposure to loss. In our inquiry into early modern risk, we will read More’s Utopia, Bacon’s New Atlantis, book two of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, and Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and The Winter’s Tale. In the course of our conversation we will also touch on the thought of Aristotle, Augustine, Luther, Hobbes, Blumenberg, Derrida, and Butler as we discuss topics ranging from utopian desire and societal engineering to the rise of speculative capitalism and insurance, from the dangers of maritime trade and metaphors of shipwreck to moral philosophy and the technologies of the self, from the hazards of transformative reading and religious conversion to hospitality, affective calculation, and the madness of decision.

Spring 2013

ENGL 231 | Studies in Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare, Marlowe, & Early Modern Political Thought

2011-2012

Fall 2011

ENGL 231 | Studies in Renaissance Literature: Some Shakespeare, Some Theory

ENGL 232 | Studies in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature: Jane Austen and the Invention of the “Modern” English Novel
In the past few decades, scholars have begun to appreciate the pivotal role of Jane Austen in the invention of the ‘modern’ novel. Between the 18th century ‘rise’ of the novel to a newly influential form of print entertainment and the literary hegemony that the novel achieved in the 19th and 20th centuries, there come the innovations of Jane Austen’s six novels: Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion.

How can we overcome our over-familiarity with Austen? My first strategy in this course is to read ‘all’ of Jane Austen: her six novels, as well as the most significant juvenilia and letters. We can defamiliarize this corpus in other ways: 1) By studying her language: her characteristic diction and rhetoric; her narrative technique (free indirect discourse), her tone (detachment, sympathy), her generic blends (satire & sentiment), and her style (irony, understatement, etc.); 2) by contrasting her novels to some of those written before and after; 3) by tracing the connections between her novels and the complex and heterogeneous network out of which they emerged: the gentry estates of the ‘home’ counties of England, the private oral reading of the Austen family, the business of early 19th century publication and criticism, etc.; 4) by developing an historical analysis of the distinctive fascination her books have excited in avowed fans (i.e. ‘the Janeites’) as well as modern critics.

What is it that makes a Jane Austen novel distinctive? Why have her novels come to appear ‘classic’ and normative for novels that would be ‘realistic’ or ‘English’? How might we visualize her novels as communication systems? How, in short, might we do an actor-network theory analysis of all that unfolds under the name ‘Jane Austen’?
Requirements: 2 short oral presentations to the seminar and one seminar term paper. Auditors are welcome.