Idea Transcript
Senior Seminars (EN480) in English 2016-2017 Block 2: Marie de France: Hybridity, Monstrosity, Metamorphoses (Evitt) Who is Marie de France? What did she write? Why do both England and France claim her as an author within their canons? Why is she obsessed in her fables, poetic short fiction, and religious narratives with blood, monstrosity, and metamorphoses as markers of community, identity, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, culture? In this course we’ll explore Marie’s status as a twelfth-century Anglo-Norman author writing in both France and trilingual twelfth-century England. We’ll consider how her translations of Aesop’s Fables and use of Ovidian subtexts both connect her to classical antiquity and propel her beyond it into a shrewd critique of power and gender in twelfth-century Western European court culture. We’ll explore how she articulates feudal politics through monstrosity (werewolf and other transubstantive beast narratives) to map the relationship between the gender double-standards that haunt both marriage and illicit love and and the power dynamics of the French and English courts. We’ll investigate how her theologically innovative explorations of religious lives in Saint Patrick’s Purgatory and The Life of Saint Audrey allow her to excavate lost (or suppressed) indigenous connections (not just Celtic, but Irish and Anglo-Saxon). Marie’s works serve as a kind of cognitive literary mapping that “call[s] attention to the complexity of borders of all kinds, reminding us that beneath the master narratives of conquest, colonialism, and assimilation we are likely to find an array of shifting political, linguistic, and socio-cultural affinities in which relations of power are negotiated in various, sometimes unpredictable, ways” (Kinoshita and McCracken, “The World of Marie de France” 6). Readings include: Marie De France’s works (in translation)—Fables (Ysope), Lais, Saint Patrick’s Purgatory, The Life of Saint Audrey. Selections from literary intertexts—Aesop, Fables; Cicero, De Inventione; Ovid, Metamorphoses; Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria Nova; Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of England; contemporary theological and hagiographic intertexts. Additional theoretical, historical, and critical contextual readings.
Blocks 5-6: Shakespeare in Time (Love) In this senior seminar, we will study Shakespeare “in time” in a number of different ways. First, we will look at the development of Shakespeare’s career—from early comedy (The Comedy of Errors) to late comedy (Twelfth Night); from early tragedy (Titus Andronicus) to mature tragedy (Hamlet) and late romance (The Winter’s Tale)—which will give us a foundation in Shakespeare’s habits and growth as a playwright, as well as his use of ancient and less-ancient sources. Then we’ll look at Shakespeare in the context of his time by reading the “before/during/after” playwrights to whom he is most often compared, by whom he was influenced and whom he most influenced: his most powerful predecessor (Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus), his contrasting coeval (Ben Jonson, Volpone), and his remarkable heir (John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi). With this background in place, we will then undertake two case studies of Shakespeare across time—from his own time to our own. Through the lens of Richard III and Othello, we will look at the reception and the cultural meanings of these plays in the late 16th/early 17th century, through the “invention of Shakespeare” in the 18th century, to films, performance traditions, and adaptations in the present day. Our studies of Shakespeare in the present will feature study of American ethnic minority (Toni Morrison, Desdemona) and global Anglophone appropriations and rewritings of Othello. Throughout the course, our secondary readings will help us craft a critical and theoretical timeline of scholarship on Shakespeare, from the character-centered criticism of A.C. Bradley in the early 20th century, to the New Historicism of Stephen Greenblatt in the latter part of the 20th century, to current approaches in queer, disability, gender, race and ethnic studies. This course is designed to build on your education throughout the English major: it will require skills developed in Intro to Poetry and Intro to Literary Theory; it will ask you to make connections with your studies of historical periods as well as with American ethnic and Anglophone engagements with the canonical Western literary tradition. It is appropriate for those who have taken a number of Shakespeare classes as well as those who have taken none. For your capstone project in the course, you will be free to write about one or more of the plays we have studied in any of the “times” we have studied: arguments that include consideration of Shakespeare appropriations, adaptations, films, non-Western performance traditions, and the like, will all be welcome, as will projects about the plays alone. Those interested in further study of Shakespeare’s classical or medieval intertexts will also be welcome to pursue these inquiries.
Junior Seminars (EN399) in English – 2016-2017 Block 3: Reading the Popular (Sarchett) Textual and historical analysis of "formula fiction" and popular genres such as romances, Westerns, thrillers, detective stories, horror stories, and science fiction, while also examining traditional ways of distinguishing between "high art" and the popular. Readings from such authors as Harriet Beecher Stowe, H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Zane Grey, Margaret Mitchell, Raymond Chandler, Ian Fleming, Stephen King, as well as selected critics and theories. Block 5: Anglo-American Identities (Richman) In this course we will study the role that the written word played in building a transatlantic literary culture linking the British Isles to the Americas from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. We will attend not only to the ways in which Britain shaped the literature of its colonies, but also to the profound influence that texts from and about the Americas exerted on those living in Britain. Central topics will include depictions of African slaves and American Indians, religious and political controversies, circum-Atlantic identity amidst war, conceptions of revolution, empire, the Black Atlantic, and transatlantic travel. Requirements include lively class participation, short weekly response papers, a class presentation, and two research essays. Authors may include, Anna Barbauld, Aphra Behn, William Blake, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecouer, Benjamin Franklin, Philip Freneau, Oliver Goldsmith, James Grainger, Washington Irving, Thomas Jefferson, Olaudah Equiano, Thomas Paine, Charlotte Smith, Phillis Wheatley, Unca Eliza Winkfield, and William Wordsworth.