ENGL 5029

ENGL 5029: British Literature and Culture Before 1800

Anonymous — Thu, 26 Mar 2020 15:50:16 +0000

ENGL 5029: British Literature and Culture Before 1800 Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 03/26/2020 - 09:50

This course is first and foremost an introduction to one of the most widely-read and influential poets in English literature – Geoffrey Chaucer. In order to appreciate Chaucer’s great skill as an author, we will be reading his works alongside some of his sources and the work of some of his contemporaries: the Middle English poem Pearl with Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, Dante’s Inferno with Chaucer’s House of Fame; Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy with Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and Miller’s Tale. As is perhaps fitting for an author associated with the idea of English literature (Chaucer was for many years known as the “father of English poetry”), the course will also explore what it means to do literary scholarship especially now, in this time of crisis. We will familiarize ourselves with the past trends in Chaucer scholarship and contemplate what the future might bring.

Introduces graduate level study of medieval and early modern writing through the long eighteenth century. Emphasizes a wide range of genres, forms, historical background, and secondary criticism. Cultivates research skills necessary for advanced graduate study. Topics will vary.

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 6.00 total credit hours. Allows multiple enrollment in term.
Requisites: Restricted to English (ENGL) and English Lit- Creative Writing (CRWR) graduate students only.
Additional Information:Departmental Category: Graduate Courses

Taught by Katie Little.

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ENGL 5029: British Literature and Culture Before 1800 (Fall 2019)

Anonymous — Thu, 04 Apr 2019 17:00:37 +0000

ENGL 5029: British Literature and Culture Before 1800 (Fall 2019) Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 04/04/2019 - 11:00

ENGL 5029-001

Medieval Genres, Katie Little

The Middle Ages has long been synonymous with "quiet hierarchies," Christian dogmatism, and primitive thinking. And yet, it was also (or instead) a time of great literary invention and experimentation: the beginning of a literature in English, the emergence of new genres, and challenges to clerical dominance (to those who owned literature). This course will approach the variety and complexity, the familiarity and the weirdness of medieval literature by looking at its distinctive kinds or genres: the romance, the dream vision, the cycle play, the saints' life, the estates' satire, the devotional treatise, and the exemplum. Our medieval texts will include works by Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, Marie de France, and Julian of Norwich. Our approach to genre will be informed by recent debates over what a genre is and does, and we will touch on the following theories: socially symbolic (Fredric Jameson), reader response (Jan Radway), discourse analysis (Norman Fairclough), composition/ rhetoric (Amy Devitt), and cognitive/ literary science (the work of social psychologists).

MA Designation: Literature Before 1800, Poetry Intensive, A (Formalisms)

ENGL 5029-002

Racial Ecologies of Risk, Ramesh Mallipeddi

Plantation agriculture was a hazardous enterprise. Tropical plants, sugar in particular, are vulnerable not only to pests, droughts, hurricanes, and wildfires but also to loss of soil fertility. In his 1729 The Trade and Navigation of Great Britain Considered, the Quaker merchant Joshua Gee observed that “the island of Barbados is very much worn out, and does not afford the quantity of sugar as heretofore” (45). Planters recognized that, as fertility declined, additional slave importations and new uncultivated lands would be necessary to produce enough sugar for the world market. They endeavored, in other words, to counter the irreversible effects of environmental degradation by making African bodies and colonial landscapes replaceable.

The course examines how the plantation complex transferred risks or uncertainties entailed by speculation to its most vulnerable groups: African migrants and Caribbean slaves. Drawing on late 17th and early 18th natural and social histories of the Caribbean (by Richard Ligon, John Oldmixon, and Edward Long), Samuel Martin’s plantation manual _An Essay on Plantership_ (1762), James Grainger’s West-India Georgic _The Sugar Cane_ (1764), John Hippisley’s _On the Populousness of Africa_ (1765), the testimonies before the select committee of the House of Commons, and slave narratives such as _The History of Mary Prince_ (1831), the course investigates how the subjugation of slaves and soil, labor and land, and bodies and landscapes was a social and environmental disaster—one with lasting consequences for African Caribbean slaves and their emancipated descendants.

MA Designation: Literature Before 1800, C (Bodies/Identities/Collectivities), D (Cultures/Politics/Histories)

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ENGL 5029-002: British Literature and Culture Before 1800, Beowulf: The Culture and The Critics (Spring 2019)

Anonymous — Thu, 04 Oct 2018 19:38:59 +0000

ENGL 5029-002: British Literature and Culture Before 1800, Beowulf: The Culture and The Critics (Spring 2019) Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 10/04/2018 - 13:38

Professor Tiffany Beechy

The Old English poem we call Beowulf has long been held as a kind of canonical “beginning” for English literature, though in more of a “prehistoric” sense than a foundational one. English departments liked to have an Anglo-Saxonist around to expose students to Old English as a way to inculcate a sense of a long history, of firmly rooted origins so dim as to be unrecognizable, uncivilized. As claims to tradition, to patrimony, and to cultural legitimacy have surged to the forefront of national consciousness since 2016, medievalisms of several kinds have become current, even urgent, once again. Medieval studies itself is in the midst of painful struggles over legitimacy, inclusion, and identity. This course will read Beowulf (in facing-page translation) as a nexus of these many related cultural forces. The poem is itself a dark meditation upon patrimony and power, and we will consider it alongside important recent reworkings of the poem, including Maria Dahvana Headley’s new radical feminist novel The Mere Wife and Paul Kingsnorth’s pseudo-dialectal The Wake, among many other works in print and in the blogosphere.

MA-Lit Course Designation: Literature Before 1800, A (Formalisms), B (Technologies/Epistemologies), C (Bodies/Identities/Collectivities)

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ENGL 5029-001: British Literature and Culture Before 1800, Slavery and Eighteenth-Century Literature (Spring 2019)

Anonymous — Thu, 04 Oct 2018 19:36:15 +0000

ENGL 5029-001: British Literature and Culture Before 1800, Slavery and Eighteenth-Century Literature (Spring 2019) Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 10/04/2018 - 13:36

Professor Ramesh Mallipeddi

In 1790, the planter-historian William Beckford claimed that Jamaica was “one of the richest jewels in the crown of Great Britain.” In the eighteenth century, slave-grown sugar was Britain’s most important colonial commodity, and Caribbean colonies, her most prized economic possessions, more valuable in gross economic terms than the Thirteen (American) Colonies. The rise of chattel slavery in the Caribbean, supported by labor from Africa and capital from Europe, not only restructured socio-economic life in the British Atlantic but also shaped the literary cultures of the long eighteenth century. This course will focus on a variety of literary and historical narratives that emerged out of, responded to, and intervened in three principal contexts of racial slavery: the slave trade across the Atlantic, plantation slavery in the Caribbean, and the campaign to abolish slavery in England. Readings will likely include Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688); Richard Steele’s Inkle and Yarico (1711); Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719); Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768); Ignatius Sancho’s Letters of Ignatius Sancho (1782); Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789); Mary Prince’s The History of Mary Prince (1831); and Matthew Lewis’s The Journal of a West India Proprietor (1834). Our method will be simultaneously historical and theoretical. We will study our primary texts vis-à-vis contemporary accounts of the slave trade and slavery (Thomas Phillips, Richard Ligon, Charles Leslie, Bryan Edwards, and Edward Long). At the same time, we will attempt to frame our discussions around a set of critical concepts—commodification, capitalist modernity, creolization, diaspora, and racialization—that have been developed by various theorists, including Stuart Hall, Orlando Patterson, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Ian Baucom, Paul Gilroy, and Simon Gikandi. The course is intended as an introduction to the long eighteenth century, given its attention to several canonical and popular texts from the period. But it will also be of interest to students with broader (i.e. comparative) interests in the histories of slavery, race, and colonialism. Requirements: regular attendance and class participation, periodic posts on D2L, one 5-page book review, a class presentation, and a final 15-page research paper.

MA-Lit Course Designation: Literature Before 1800, C (Bodies/Identities/Collectivities), D (Cultures/Politics/Histories)

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ENGL 5029-001: British Literature and Culture, Medieval Drama

Anonymous — Thu, 16 Aug 2018 20:53:37 +0000

ENGL 5029-001: British Literature and Culture, Medieval Drama Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 08/16/2018 - 14:53

Professor Katie Little

The plays that survive from the Middle Ages were written for street performances, services in churches and monasteries, entertainment in great halls and outdoor stages, but never for theaters as such. As games and/or worship more so than texts per se, these plays require as much an anthropological as a purely literary approach: when medieval people performed or attended performances what were they doing, thinking, and feeling? In this course, we will explore the great variety of these performances: cycle plays about biblical history, the so-called morality plays about how to be saved, liturgical plays celebrating important Christian holidays, plays about saints and miracles, and town pageants. To aid in this exploration, we will read theories of ritual, drama, and performance by Catherine Bell, Victor Turner, Bertolt Brecht, and Augusto Boal, among others. Even as we make use of the critical categories we’ve inherited or borrowed, we will question the extent of their usefulness and our own preconceptions about what drama should or shouldn’t be. As an introductory level graduate course, this course assumes no previous knowledge of medieval literature, and we will spend time discussing the expectations for what graduate study of this period/ literature looks like.

MA-Lit Course Designation: A (Formalisms), Literature Before 1800

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