2003-2004 Theme:
Home and World

The EMC theme for 2003-2004, “Home and the World,” asks how these paired categories were defined and redefined against one another throughout the early modern period. For example, such concepts crucial to the period as domesticity and a “separate spheres” social model, the national homeland, “worldliness” and “cosmopolitanism” as terms of approbation or otherwise, the racial or ethnic “Other” of colonial discourse, come into being only against their asymmetric opposites.

Several early modern graduate and undergraduate courses will participate in the “Home and the World” theme this year in the English Department and affiliated departments. There will also be a Fall colloquium on the topic, a Winter faculty and graduate student conference, and a Spring undergraduate conference (featuring students from participating courses throughout the academic year).

2003-2004 Events


Theme-Related Courses

Fall 2003

ENGL 114EM | Women and Literature-Going Public: Early Modern Women (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. authors including Astell, Behn, Finch, Montagu, Philips, and Scott, along with current scholarship on these writers and their contexts. Individual seminars will focus on codings of the female body and 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 gets read?) – then and now.

CL 265 | The New Poetry of 16th C Spain, France, and England (Graduate)
In sixteenth-century Spain, France, and England, a new poetry appeared that radically and quite deliberately broke with the vernacular literary past. In Spain, this new poetry was identified most strongly with Juan Boscán and Garcilaso de la Vega. Joachim du Bellay, Pierre de Ronsard, and the other members of the group made famous as the “Pléiade” dominated the comparable movement in France. And in England, Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser played a similar role. This course will examine these three movements and some of the shared conditions that shaped them, including the relation of literature to the royal court and court politics, the divided allegiance of poetry to manuscript transmission and print, the dependence of poetic reform on linguistic reform more generally, the question of appropriate metric and generic forms, the informing precedence of Greece, Rome, and especially Renaissance Italy, and the central place accorded the erotic. How, we will be asking, did this new poetry provide a cultural home in a rapidly changing world? Note on language: Students will be encouraged to use whatever relevant language skills they may have, but the course will be taught in English and all non-English texts will be available in English translation as well as in their original languages.

Winter 2004

ENGL 144C | The European Renaissance (Undergraduate)
This course will focus on one of the most characteristic expressions of the European Renaissance, the “new poetry” of sixteenth-century Spain, France, and England – and, in particular, on sonnets and sonnet sequences. We’ll start with Francis Petrarch, the great Italian model for that new poetry, and will then move on to Garcilasso de la Vega, Pierre de Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay, Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser, before ending with two or three weeks on the sonnets of William Shakespeare. All Italian, Spanish, and French texts will be available in both their original language and English translation. (This course is also being offered as Comparative Literature 180.)

ENGL 197 | Home and World: A Lowly Perspective (Undergraduate)
(in EMC but also scheduled in Seminar room or SH 1415 for access to digital projector, TR 12-1:15) This will be an undergraduate version of my grad course, also an EMC theme course pursuing the Center’s topic for the year 2003-2004 of “Home and World.” The course will adopt the perspective of the lower and middle classes. We will look at works by and for these classes that address questions of national, economic, and domestic identity as they are defined in contestation with a spatial or conceptual “other” (ie., not home, however “home” might be defined). Works will include: ballads about apprentices, the exotic, and the home; Arden of Faversham; Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor; Thomas Deloney’s Jack of Newbury, Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveler, Christopher Marlow’s The Jew of Malta, Shakespeare’s, The Merchant of Venice; Shakespeare’s The Tempest; Raleigh’s “Discovery of the Guiana”; and the new world seaman’s narrative, “I Miles Philips.” Students who distinguish themselves in the class will be asked to participate in the spring undergraduate conference on the theme of “Home and World.”

ENGL 231 | Home and World: A Lowly Perspective (Graduate)
(in EMC but also scheduled in Seminar Room, for access to the digital projector, R: 2-4:30) This will be an EMC theme course pursuing the Center’s topic for the year 2003-2004 of “Home and World.” The course will adopt the perspective of the lower and middle classes. We will look at works by and for these classes that address questions of national, economic, and domestic identity as they are defined in contestation with a spatial or conceptual “other” (ie., not home, however “home” might be defined). Works will include: ballads about apprentices, the exotic, and the home; Arden of Faversham; Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor; Thomas Deloney’s Jack of Newbury, Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveler, Christopher Marlow’s The Jew of Malta, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice; Shakespeare’s The Tempest; Raleigh’s “Discovery of the Guiana”; and the new world seaman’s narrative, “I Miles Philips.”

ENGL 232 | Poetry of Domesticity (Graduate)
We study and discuss what I call the poetry of stasis (from the Greek, “to stand”), poems relating to a place, to house and home, to tradition, stability, constancy, domesticity, community, “nature.” Many of these poems are written by women, and we’ll begin with Aemilia Lanyer’s “The Description of Cooke-ham” and read other “country house” poems by Jonson, Marvell, and Pope. We shall read the “paradise” books of Milton’s Paradise Lost (esp. 4, 5, and 8), and other poems by Dryden, Finch, Montagu, Thomson, Gray, Leapor, Carter, Blamire, Hannah More, and others. And by way of contrast we’ll also look at some poems of ekstasis (“a being put out of its place”), or ecstasy. This course was devised for the Early Modern Center “Home and the World” theme for 2003-2004.

HIST 277AB | The Human and the Other in Early Modern Europe (Graduate)
This course will look at animals, monsters, the disabled and other examples of the “not human” in natural philosophy as a way of defining the human in the period from about 1500-1800.

Spring 2004

ENGL 197 | Upper-Division Seminar: The Rise of Novels (Undergraduate)
The modern rise of novels, into a popular form of entertainment and a type of writing that claims to be literature, is deeply implicated in the home-building and home-improvement that secures England’s distinctive national difference from the other peoples of other lands (France, the Caribbean, the Americans). But, at least since the 17th century, novel writing has also been implicated in those acts of imperial expansion through which one secures other peoples and places as part of one’s empire. This course returns to the “rise of the novel” narrative as first formulated by the literary historian Ian Watt, to understand how the novel as a distinctively modern genre was shaped in its language and rhetoric to play a crucial role in both the construction of national identity, as well as the expansion of the British imperial project. We will read and discuss four novels in our course: two novels often described as the first English novels – Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742); Jane Austen’s novel, Mansfield Park (1814), and Hawthorne’s attempt to write a distinctively American novel, out of English Puritan materials, with The Scarlet Letter (1850). While we will focus our study on four major novels, written between 1740 and 1850, we will also read some of the most influential accounts of the novel from 18th and modern critics (Diderot, S. Johnson, Bakhtin, etc.). Requirements: one short 4-page paper (as the basis of a seminar presentation); one 10-page term paper.

ENGL 232 | The Rise of Novels: Nation and Empire (Graduate)
The modern rise of novels, into a popular form of entertainment and a type of writing that claims to be literature, is deeply implicated in the home-building and home-improvement that secures England’s distinctive national difference from the other peoples of other lands (France, the Caribbean, the Americans). But, at least since the 17th century, novel writing has also been implicated in those acts of imperial expansion through which one secures other peoples and places as part of one’s empire. This course returns to the “rise of the novel” narrative as first formulated by Ian Watt, to understand how the novel as a distinctively modern genre was shaped in its language and rhetoric to play a crucial role in both the construction of national identity (Anderson’s “imagined communities”), as well as the expansion of the British imperial project. Hawthorne’s attempt to write a distinctively American novel, out of English Puritan materials, demonstrates the flexibility of the novel as a vehicle for writing other than English identity. While we will focus our study on five major novels, written between 1740 and 1850, we will also read some of the most influential accounts of the novel from 18th and modern critics (Diderot, S. Johnson, Bakhtin, etc.). For a final paper, students may write on any appropriate novel from the Renaissance to the modern period, including modern novels where these issues are most salient, like Garcia-Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.

1: Introduction: a brief genealogy of “rise of novel” story; nation and empire; nation versus empire
2: The imperial project at the beginnings of the national English novel: (Lafayette’s “The Princess of Monpellier” – a very short “novelle”; and referencing passages from, without a full reading of Oroonoko, and Robinson Crusoe) Criticism: Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities
3: Richardson’s Pamela 1740: Ian Watt on the modern “self” and novel Criticism: Ian Watt; Nancy Armstrong
4: Haywood’s Fantomina 1725, Fielding’s Shamela 1741, and Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, 1742. the struggle around moralizing the novel so as to English it Criticism: Denis Diderot (Eloge a Richardson), Samuel Johnson (Rambler #4), Hippolyte Taine.
5: Fielding, Joseph Andrews, 1742; theatricality, and the novel (week 2) Criticism: Fielding (essay on character, world as theater); Bakhtin (dialogism, heteroglossia), Michael Fried (theatricality)
6: Austen, Mansfield Park, 1814: Austen harnesses the technology of “recit indirect libre” to write the “classic” novel of English identity Criticism: Ann Banfield & Dorrit Cohn on narrative; Deidre Lynch on Austen’s Englishness
7: Mansfield Park, week 2 (Guest professor: David Marshall) Criticism: David Marshall, Fanny Price and the problem of theatricality; Edward Said and the imperialism of the “domestic” novel
8: Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter. 1850 Writing a distinctively American novel through a turn to toward a romance narrative of the English Puritan origins of America Criticism: Perry Miller (American Renaissance); Lauren Berlant (National fantasy); Alexis de Tocqueville
9: The Scarlet Letter, week 2
10: open for reports

HIST 277AB | The Human and the Other in Early Modern Europe (Graduate)
This course will look at animals, monsters, the disabled and other examples of the “not human” in natural philosophy as a way of defining the human in the period from about 1500-1800.


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