298. Experimental Courses
Introduction to English Renaissance Literature and Culture: Queens, Kings, Wooing and Wedding
Elizabeth I, England's (eternally) Virgin Queen, inspired lyrics, epics, and plays. We'll read and decipher some sonnets, perform scenes from Shakespeare, and get metaphysical with John Donne. As a class we'll attend a play together, practice "close reading," and report on persons and passions of English early modern culture. Writing requirements include maintaining a journal that explicates our reading, a play review, a material culture project and an analytical paper.
Eighteenth-Century Bristish Literature and the Technology of Writing
This course reconstructs the shock accompanying the proliferation of writing in 18th-century British culture. Through readings from Addison, Swift, Richardson and Coleridge, among other less-familiar authors, we will examine the discomfort associated with writing's capacity to produce change. Today a similar kind of uneasiness is on the rise as the internet encourages readers to create their own texts. Given our heightened awareness of the effects that online media have on us, we will juxtapose past and present uncertainties about what the technology of writing does. Taking 18th-century British poetry, prose, and fiction as its point of departure, the course explores the varying ways in which writing induced readers to become writers themselves and how this shift influenced the formation of subjectivity, social relations, gender and race.
(Daniel Block)