The EMC theme for 2004-2005, “Memory,” will explore such concepts as cultural and individual memory, acts of memorializing, forgetting, the sense of a past (and future), adaptations, and archiving (including archiving technologies). Whether individuals employ memory as a means of accessing information, or cultures use collective memory to commemorate historical events and people, memory also shapes the present and the future as it colors the lens through which new experiences are viewed.
What is not memorialized is often as important as what is, and courses offered this year will explore the relationship between memory and forgetting, adaptations of memory, and means of accessing memories via different forms of cultural artifacts. Especially germane to this is the Early Modern Center’s Online English Ballad Archive Project. Slated to digitize all extant ballads from 1500-1800, current work is focused on mounting the Pepys Ballads online and making them widely available for the first time ever.
Several early modern graduate and undergraduate courses will participate in the Memory theme this year in the English Department and affiliated departments. There will also be a Fall colloquium on the topic, a graduate student organized conference, Memory 1500-1800, and a Spring undergraduate conference (featuring students from participating courses throughout the academic year).
2004-2005 Events
Theme-Related Courses
Fall 2004
ENGL 197 | English Broadside Ballads, 1500-1800 (Undergraduate)
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, blackletter 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 annotated transcriptions of some of the 1,775 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, beginning with the ballads collected by Pepys. Assignments: Two oral and written reports on a facet of ballad culture generally and on a ballad theme in the Pepys collection (6-10 minutes; 2-3 pages each) as well as online annotated transcriptions of two Pepys ballads.
ENGL 231 | English Broadside Ballads 1500-1800 (Graduate)
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, blackletter 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 annotated transcriptions of some of the 1,775 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, beginning with the ballads collected by Pepys. Assignments: Two oral and written reports on a facet of ballad culture generally and on a ballad theme in the Pepys collection (6-10 minutes; 2-3 pages each) as well as online annotated transcriptions of two Pepys ballads.