ENG2012HS
Life-Writing in Early Modern England
Course Description
An introduction to the varied forms and practices of early modern life-writing, including diaries, familiar letters, spiritual autobiographies, conversion narratives, martyr stories, personal essays, financial account books, and spousal memoirs. Our primary aim will be to examine the multiple, sometimes conflicting, possibilities for writing a life, whether one’s own or another’s, during a period of profound and often violent religious and political change. Our secondary aim will be to engage some of the experimental and methodological approaches by which novelists, critics, and historians, from Virginia Woolf to Saidiya Hartman, have sought to narrate untold life stories in ways that confront and creatively surmount the opacities of the archive or the historical record. Together we will consider how these approaches might limit or expand our own efforts to understand, and represent, how early modern individuals lived and wrote about their lives.
Course Reading List
Primary readings may include: George Cavendish, The Life of Cardinal Wolsey; William Baldwin, A Mirror for Magistrates; John Foxe, Acts and Monuments; John Florio (trans.) The Essayes of Montaigne; the letters and diary of Lady Anne Clifford; Lucy Hutchinson, The Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson; John Aubrey, Brief Lives; Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae; the diary of Samuel Pepys; and Aphra Behn, Oroonoko. Creative, critical, and theoretical readings may include work by John Dryden, Saidiya Hartman Hermonie Lee, Hilary Mantel, Lena Orlin, Christina Sharpe, Simonie Smith and Julia Watson, Adam Smyth, and Virginia Woolf.
Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements
Generous participation (10%); Weekly discussion posts (20%); Short experimental essay (20%); Research essay to be developed in stages: proposal, critical review, circulated partial draft, peer review workshop, and final version (50%)
Term: S-TERM (January 2023 to April 2023)
Date/Time: Monday / 10:00 am to 12:00 pm
Location: Room JHB 718 (Jackman Humanities Building, 170 St. George Street)
Delivery: In-Person
ENG2017HF
Early Modern Asexualities
L. Blake
Course Description
This course will have two main goals. First, we will read and discuss modern scholarship on asexuality, the sexual orientation often characterized by or defined as a lack of sexual attraction. We will investigate asexuality as a queer identity, and talk about how the study of asexuality has the potential to bring new perspectives to queer theory. Second, we will think about what it means to look for and read for asexuality in history. We will read sixteenth and seventeenth century literature, asking what it means to look for asexuality and aromanticism beyond the twentieth century. We will continually ask not just how to build an “asexual archive”—how to find traces of asexuality and aromanticism in the past—but also how the particular shapes of asexuality that we find in early modern texts might help us rethink modern allonormativity (the assumption that everyone experiences sexual attraction) and amatonormativity (the assumption that most people should be striving to be in romantic pairings or couples).
The class does not assume any prior knowledge of asexuality.
Course Reading List
Possible primary readings include: William Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing [play]; Anon, The Four Prentices of London [play]; Margaret Cavendish, Convent of Pleasure [play]; William Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis [long narrative poem]; Thomas Nashe, “The Choice of Valentines” [short narrative poem]; John Marston, Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image [erotic epyllion]; Katherine Phillips, metaphysical poetry of friendship; Abraham Cowley, The Mistress [a collection of poetry that caused Samuel Johnson to call him a “philosophical rhymer who had only ever heard of the other sex”]; C17 “Platonic Love” poetry movement and its opponents
Possible secondary readings include theory and criticism by Ela Przybylo, Danielle Cooper, Kim F. Hall, Ianna Hawkins Owen, Christine Varnado, Eunjung Kim, Mel Y. Chen, Simone Chess, Michael Cobb, Melissa E. Sanchez, Elizabeth Hanna Hanson, as well as asexual blogs and other public writing from the online ace community.
Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements
Class Participation (20%), Seminar Presentation(s) (15%), Research Collection Blog Post (10%), Final Paper Proposal (5%), Final Paper Workshop (5%), Final Paper (45%).
Term: F-TERM (September 2022 to December 2022)
Date/Time: Tuesday / 9:00 am to 12:00 pm
Location: Room JHB 100A (Jackman Humanities Building, 170 St. George Street)
Delivery: In-Person
ENG2226HS
Early Modern Manuscripts
Course Description
While the digitization of early English printed books has revolutionized literary scholarship, a massive field of textual production, one that permeated every facet of early modern life, remains comparatively understudied: manuscripts. Poetry, drama, prose fiction, letters, diaries, depositions, wills, recipe books -- the rich and varied manuscript archive offers ever-expanding horizons for research as new digitization projects are making manuscripts around the world more accessible than ever before. This seminar will introduce participants to a wide range of manuscript genres while providing sustained practice in paleography. We will begin by examining the kinds of manuscripts most closely relevant to literary study (authorial holographs, verse miscellanies, dramatic scripts, playhouse documents) before exploring and move on to other forms of manuscript production of the time (letters, government documents, commonplace books, financial records). The goals of this seminar are: to introduce participants to the scope of early modern manuscript culture; to develop participants' skills in reading a variety of early modern hands; to provide orientation to the resources that will allow participants to locate and access manuscripts; and to give participants a sense of the new research possibilities on manuscript sources.
Course Texts
Primary readings will include manuscripts of works by authors such as John Donne, Queen Elizabeth I, John Milton, and Hester Pulter; while many of these texts will be short, the most substantial will likely be the collaboratively authored play Sir Thomas More (Arden edition), and The Concealed Fancies by Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley. Primary readings will be paired with secondary texts on manuscript culture from a range of historical, literary critical, and paleographical perspectives.
Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements
Participation 20%; Mini-Assignments 20%; In-Class Presentation 10%; Final Project 50%.
Term: S-TERM (January 2023 to April 2023)
Date/Time: Tuesday / 4:00 pm to 7:00 pm
Location: Room JHB 616 (Jackman Humanities Building, 170 St. George Street)
Delivery: In-Person
ENG2472HF
Milton
Course Description
A study of the poetry and prose of John Milton (1608-74), with a look at some examples of his decisive influence on the literary, political, and religious writing of succeeding centuries. The course will examine the poet’s three major works, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, attending as well to the central schools of Milton criticism of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. Topics to be explored will include Milton’s shocking innovations in poetic form, political philosophy, and religious belief, as well as his controversial treatment of such subjects as the relation of the sexes, the right to divorce, and the ongoing permissibility of polygamy. In addition to the major works of Milton, noted above, the course will feature an additional examination of Milton’s indelible mark on the poet William Blake, whose Book of Urizen we will study as a critique of Milton’s representation of the creation of the universe.
Course Reading List
Texts (available at the University of Toronto Bookstore): The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, ed. Kerrigan, Rumrich, and Fallon; additional readings posted on Quercus.
Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements
Requirements: a shorter paper (4-6 pp.), a longer, final paper (~16-20 pp.), two brief oral presentations, a brief prospectus and preliminary bibliography in advance of the final paper, and a "conference" presentation at the end of the term on your plans, or tentative plans, for the final essay. Method of evaluation: Short essay 20%, long essay 45%, 2 presentations 5%/ea, end-of-term conference presentation 10%, Participation 15%.
Term: F-TERM (September 2022 to December 2022)
Date/Time: Thursday / 10:00 am - 12:00 pm
Location: Room JHB 718 (Jackman Humanities Building, 170 St. George Street)
Delivery: In-Person
ENG2506HF
Shakespeare's Theatrical (After) Lives
Course Description
In this course we will investigate how the texts, meanings, and ideological affordances of Shakespeare's plays have been shaped and reinvented by successive generations of theatre artists from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. With a focus on Anglophone theatre, primarily in Britain and the US, we will trace how and why certain plays by Shakespeare disappear from the repertory and reemerge at other times, sometimes in radically altered forms, even as Shakespeare (in markedly different configurations) remained central to the Anglophone theatrical tradition over the centuries. Our investigations will focus on two related issues: on the one hand, the changing status of the text in discussions and practices of theatre making, and the effects of the rise of the scholarly textual editor on theatrical practices; and on the other hand, the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays have functioned as occasions for negotiating questions of gender, race, and (nationalist) politics.
Course Reading List
Plays including (but not limited to) Hamlet, Othello, Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and Richard III; archival materials ranging from 18th-century prompt books to contemporary stage managers' accounts from Shakespeare's Globe; works by scholars including Barbara Hodgdon, Peter Holland, Robert Hornback, M. J. Kidnie, Judith Pascoe, Richard Schoch, Ayanna Thompson, and many others.
Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements
Final paper 40%
Paper proposal 10%
Assigned reading and case study presentations 30%
Participation 20%
Term: F-TERM (September 2022 to December 2022)
Date/Time: Thursday / 3:00 pm to 6:00 pm
Location: Room JHB 718 (Jackman Humanities Building, 170 St. George Street)
Delivery: In-Person