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ENGL-040-01 Gateway: Med &/or Ren Lit/Cult
Fall 2009 and Spring 2010
Professor Michael Collins
COLLOQUIUM
The course will begin by proposing that a profound change in the way men and women saw the world took place in Western Europe between 1200 and 1600. After analyzing that change, the course will go on to examine how the literature of England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries responded to it. Students will be asked to read both poetry and plays by such writers as Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and John Donne.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
Course syllabi
The following syllabi may help you learn more about this course (login required):
Fall '09:
Pollnitz, Aysha
(description, file download)
Fall '09:
Pollnitz, A
(description, file download)
Additional syllabi may be available in prior academic years.
Sections:
ENGL-040-02 Gateway: Med &/or Ren Lit/Cult
Spring only
Spring 2010
Professor Sarah McNamer
This course seeks to introduce students to the vibrant, polylingual literary culture of medieval England from the eighth century to the eve of the Renaissance. Beginning with Beowulf (in the wonderful translation by Seamus Heaney), we will read both canonical and noncanonical texts, situating them in the various social, intellectual, visual and performance contexts that can restore for us a sense of their original meanings and functions. Genres will range from the familiar to the strange: we will encounter elegiac poetry, chivalric romances, a prose rhapsody, a travel narrative, miracles of the Virgin, love lyrics, a gynecological treatise, riddles, mystery plays, revelations from God, a beast fable, a bawdy fabliau and a sobering sermon on the Seven Deadly Sins. English writings will be our focus, but we will also sample (in translation) some of the abundant Latin and French texts which circulated in medieval England, in part as a reminder of the prestige these languages enjoyed and the lowly status of English during much of this period. Indeed the politics of language use will be one of our abiding concerns, as will more general questions surrounding textual production and cultural authority. Virtually all readings will be in modern English translation; we will, however, read some Old and Middle English aloud in order to experience something of the weight and music of English in its earliest days.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
ENGL-040-03 Gateway: Med&/orRen Lit&Cult
This course examines texts from a variety of genres to ask whether the politics of the English Renaissance might be described as a series of debates about or conflicts regarding royal authority. Did writers like Thomas More, Erasmus, Thomas Wyatt, and William Shakespeare think that monarchy was the best form of government? Did they regard themselves as subjects of the crown or as citizens of a republic? Who were the audiences for their texts? How did they use language to address, entertain and persuade them? Not only will we examine Renaissance writing about the public sphere but we will ask whether and how these texts shaped the ‘Monarchical Republic’ of sixteenth-century England.
This course will give students the opportunity to evaluate the “Cambridge School” method of examining texts as events—as interventions in the cultural and political worlds from which they have sprung. It will also introduce the resources of the Lauinger Library and the use of electronic databases such as Early English Books Online, JSTOR, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the Oxford English Dictionary Online.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
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Other academic years
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More information
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