Fall 2016 Graduate Courses
The following courses may be of interest to UIUC graduate students with research interests in medieval and early modern English literature and culture.
407 1U/1G INTRO TO OLD ENGLISH, Trilling
TUTH 11-12:15 CRN 49440 Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â
Old English is the language spoken and written in England between roughly 500 and 1100 AD, and it offers a window to the past through a wide range of beautiful and evocative texts. In this course, you will encounter the very oldest English literature in its original formâthe tales of kings, battles, heroes, monsters and saints that have inspired writers from John Milton to J.R.R. Tolkien. Because Old English is almost like a foreign language to Modern English speakers, the course will begin with intensive work on the basics of Old English grammar and translation practice before we move on to more in-depth study of the literature and culture of Anglo-Saxon England. Please note: This course fulfills the Pre-1800 requirement for English majors, and it may be used to fulfill the language studies elective option for Teaching of English students (with permission from an advisor). Requirements: daily attendance and participation, homework and quizzes, prepared translation, a midterm, and a final. Students taking the course for graduate credit will meet one extra hour per week (time TBD) and will write a seminar paper in addition to the regular course requirements.
416 1U/1G TOPICS IN BRITISH DRAMA TO 1660, Perry
TUTH 2-3:15 CRN 46736 Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â
TOPIC: Sex, Vengeance, and the Subjects of Tragedy
Readers familiar only with Shakespeare will be surprised by the tonal complexity and ungenteel-seeming vitality of non-Shakespearean tragedy from the early modern period. Plays by writers like Marlowe, Kyd, Middleton, Ford, and Webster (among others) can be violent, philosophical, crude, satirical, grotesque, sophisticated, horrifying, and hilariously funny by turns, and sometimes all within the same scene. This course will examine the extraordinary experimental energies of early modern drama by focusing upon tragedies depicting the outrageously anti-social: the breaking of sexual taboo (which is in turn the violation of kinship and lineage and so understood as the erasure of patriarchal social order) and the pursuit of vigilante revenge (which is forbidden in the New Testament and imagined as a violation of social norms of communal justice). In learning to read and understand some of the periodâs most willfully shocking tragedies, we will pay attention to the way they imagine sexual transgression and the need for vengeance as symptomatic of social breakdown: these are plays about the relationship between political power and subjectivity, as well as about the enfranchisement or otherwise of the political subject. They are also, and above all, wonderfully entertaining and superb to think with.
418 1U/1G SHAKESPEARE, L. Newcomb
TUTH 11-12:15 CRN 40436 Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â
This course explores seven Shakespearean plays from a range of dramatic genres. Weâll look especially at the features that made these plays popular in their day: their open staging, their playful language, and their laying bare of the periodâs familial, national, gender, and racial tensions. Weâll also consider how the meanings of âShakespeareâ keep multiplying, thanks to the constant, sometimes subversive, reinvention of the plays by literary critics, performers, and adapters world-wide. That diversity compels us to use multiple interpretive frames to look at the plays: close reading; informal staging; film analysis; feminist, historicist, postcolonial, and queer studies critical approaches. Be ready for proactive discussion, performance experiments, a rare-book library visit, and attending at least one Shakespeare play on campus, as well as special events marking 2016 as the 400th anniversary of Shakespeareâs death. Written assignments include informal writings, two focused short papers, a longer paper based on guided research (7-9 pp.), and a final exam. TEXTS:   (these print editions are required) Greenblatt et al, eds., Shakespeare: Essential Plays (3rd edition, 2016, ISBN 978-0-393-93863-0); McDonald, ed., Bedford Companion to Shakespeare (2nd edition, 2001,  ISBN 978-0312248802); one individual play edition TBA.  Â
429 1U/1G 18th CENTURY FICTION, Pollock
This course will examine the link between European colonialism and the development of recognizably modern fiction during the course of the long eighteenth centuryâa period commonly referred to as the Enlightenmentâin England, France, and the Americas. We will analyze travel both as a literal means of disseminating âenlightenmentâ between cultures, and as a metaphor for describing the formation of the âenlightenedâ person, an idealized subject defined by her/his movement into trans-cultural spaces where complicated ethical and political dilemmas must be negotiated. Indeed, one of the influential legacies of these Enlightenment fictions (or fictions of Enlightenment) has been their formulation of cosmopolitanism as a solution to the often violent clash between cultures. The popular narratives weâll study test the Enlightenmentâs cosmopolitan ethos by imagining European observers in a wide range of locales: Brazil, West Africa, the Caribbean, Persia, the Ottoman Empire, Abyssinia, and Egypt, to name a few. Time permitting, we will finish by reading some recent philosophical work on the question âWhat is Enlightenment?â and we will attempt to answer that question ourselves. Texts by Montaigne, Behn, Defoe, Montesquieu, Swift, Montagu, Johnson, Voltaire, and Equiano. Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Requirements: active participation, journal responses, three essay projects, and a final exam.
514 G SEMINAR IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE, C. Wright
TOPIC: Bibliography and Methods of Medieval StudiesÂ
This course is a practical introduction to the bibliography of Medieval Studies, with a focus on Western European textual and iconographic traditions. You will learn about the primary materials and research tools that medievalists use, and the methods and assumptions that enable various historical approaches to medieval texts and cultural artifacts. You will learn how to use the major reference guides, encyclopedias, bibliographies, and electronic databases in order to access medieval historical sources, literary texts, and artistic monuments and to locate the relevant scholarly literature. Representative topics include ecclesiastical history, medieval Latin literature, liturgy, hagiography, biblical exegesis, folklore and popular culture, sciences and encyclopedias, and iconography. Basic reading knowledge of Latin is required.
524 R SEMINAR IN 17th C LIT, Gray
TOPIC: John Milton and Seventeenth-Century Literature
Milton was a blind seer, regicidal prose-writer, and influential poet. He also wrote arguably the most ambitious English epic, one that aimed to explain the deep historical origins of human life while also addressing his war-torn contemporary moment, with all its political, affective, and spiritual turbulence. Milton grappled with some of the most controversial issues of his time, including divorce and regicide, while also elaborating ideas that often sit uncomfortably together: he was a censor who argued for restraining censorship, and a zealous anti-Catholic who argued for a limited liberty of conscience. He was known to his contemporaries as both the virginal and self-denying âLady of Christâsâ and the libertine âMilton the Divorcer.â This course will explore Miltonâs prodigious, dense, and often contradictory output, starting with his early verse and polemical prose works and ending with the whole of Paradise Lost. Throughout, we will analyze his work within three main contexts. First, we will consider the armed turmoil of the mid-seventeenth-century civil wars, which raised important questions about political form and national belonging, sex-gender relations and identities, the legitimacy of violence and the ethics of war. Second, we will explore some important seventeenth-century interlocutors for Milton, including the republicans Andrew Marvell and Lucy Hutchinson, the radical sectarians Anna Trapnel and Gerrard Winstanley, and the royalists Hester Pulter and King Charles I himself. Third, we will read scholarship by a range of Miltonists, scholars who bring a diverse array of methodsâincluding feminism, historicism, queer theory, and formalismâto bear on this most challenging of authors.
