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ENGL-142-01 Seminar: The Literature of Everyday Life in the Renaissance
Spring only
English 142: The Literature of Everyday Life in the Renaissance
Lena Cowen Orlin
In a panoramic history of western private life, Philippe Ariès called Renaissance England the “birthplace of privacy.” What set England apart from much of Europe was the Protestant Reformation, with its emphases on immediate engagement with scripture (an impetus to literacy) and on personal responsibility for the spiritual state (the “growth of individualism”). For Ariès, it was symptomatic that so many English men and women textualized their everyday lives in diaries and family memoirs. This seminar will look at journals, autobiographies, biographies, letters, personal advice, and legal depositions from Shakespeare’s time. Were these new genres instruments of reflection, self-expression, self-fashioning, self-fictionalizing—or some combination? Which conventions of literary form, religious and political thought, and economic concern shaped them? What were the uses of artifice, fantasy, and humor in personal history? Why did accounts of spiritual self-examination and social regulation document so much gossip, scandal, and controversy? How can we locate the voices of people who were otherwise “hidden from history” because they left few textual traces?
Credits: 4
Prerequisites: None
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