Carleton University Department of English Fall ENGL 5308: Renaissance Studies Topic: After Rome

Transcription

1 Carleton University Department of English Fall 2010 ENGL 5308: Renaissance Studies Topic: After Rome Day and Time: Thursdays 1:00 4:00 p.m. Room: 1816 Dunton Tower Professor A. Wallace Office phone: ext.1039 Office: 1922 Dunton Tower Office hours: T.B.A. After Rome The course studies the cultural stakes of England s affinity for versions of Rome, and explores what it might mean to speak of a Renaissance (even, perhaps, of serial Renaissances ) of antiquity in Britain. To see Britain s material and imaginativee contacts with ancient Rome first as reasserting themselves in the wake of the conversion to Christianity and then as experiencing a rebirth during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is to replay in several keys Rome s original military and administrative dominion over the island. It is significant, then, that the sites and institutions of Medieval and Renaissance Britain (its monasteries, scriptoria, chantry and grammar schools, universities, playhouses, print shops, bookstalls, pulpits, royal courts, brothels, graveyards, and even the landscape itself) understood themselves as being in some curious sense haunted by the spectres of ancient Rome. This course studies those hauntings. Weekly readings will juxtapose ancient and early modern literary texts with critical, historical, and philosophical / theoretical work. Readings will include texts by Virgil, Ovid, Seneca, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Sir Thomas Browne, and others. Required Texts Virgil [Publius Vergilius Maro], The Eclogues, trans. Guy Lee, Rev. ed. (Penguin, 1984). [ISBN X] Virgil [Publius Vergilius Maro], The Aeneid, trans. Allen Mandelbaum, 2 nd ed. (University of California Press, 2007). [ISBN ] Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book 2, ed. Erik Gray (Hackett, 2006). [ISBN ] William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Oxford, 2008). [ ] William Shakespeare, Cymbeline (Oxford, 2008). [ ]

2 After Rome 2 *Course texts will be ordered through Octopus Books (116 Third Avenue, the Glebe). Phone *A course binder of the remaining primary and secondary readings will be placed in the English Department s photocopy room (1812A) at Dunton Tower. These texts are marked on the reading schedule. Grading System 25% Seminar presentation / paper 25% Annotated Bibliography 50% Research Paper Faithful attendance and informed, consistent participation are mandatory. Members of the seminar are responsible for conscientious preparation and discussion in class. You must bring your readings to every class. Two missed meetings will result in a 5% reduction in your grade; three missed meetings will result a 10% reduction; four missed meetings will result in failure. Seminar presentations are to be delivered (that is, read from a full text, but not improvised). Your paper should offer a well-organized study of one or two problems posed by the day s readings. Your chief goal should be to give your colleagues a clear sense of what is at stake in the day s readings. (The goal here is to simulate the kind of paper that might be delivered at an academic conference.) Be sure to frame the presentation to generate and facilitate discussion. Seminars will be timed and cut off at 20 minutes. This amounts to approximately 9 double-spaced pages. Please note that you are required to submit your typescript at the end of class. [25%] An annotated bibliography assignment is due at the beginning of class, Week 6. This assignment will be distributed and discussed at our first meeting. [25%] Topics for the research paper (18-20 pages) must be discussed and approved. The research paper will be a full development of work initiated in the annotated bibliography assignment. You must submit a hard copy of the paper; I can t accept attachments. The paper must be in my mailbox at the English Department by 1 pm, three days after the final class of the course. [50%] Accommodations You may need special arrangements to meet your academic obligations during the term because of disability, pregnancy or religious obligations. Please review the course outline promptly and write to me with any requests for academic accommodation during the first two weeks of class, or as soon as possible after the need for accommodation is known to exist. It takes time to review and consider each request individually, and to arrange for accommodations where appropriate. Please be sure to respect these timelines particularly for in-class tests, mid-terms and final exams, as well as any change in due dates for papers. You can visit the Equity Services website to view the policies and to obtain more detailed information on academic accommodation at Plagiarism and Instructional Offences

3 After Rome 3 Please see the section on Instructional Offences in the Graduate Calendar. The Graduate Calendar defines an act of plagiarism as an attempt to use and pass off as one s own idea or product the work of another without expressly giving credit to the original author. Any act of plagiarism will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the guidelines set out in the Graduate Calendar. Penalties may include expulsion from Carleton University; they will certainly include expulsion from this course with a grade of F. The Graduate Calendar specifies that the act of submitting substantially the same piece of work to two or more courses without the prior written permission of the instructors from all courses involved constitutes an Instructional Offence punishable under the guidelines set out in the Graduate Calendar. Please note: Minor modifications and amendments, such as changes of phraseology in an essay or paper, do not constitute a significant and acceptable reworking of an assignment. No piece of work written for another course will be accepted for credit in this course. Reading Schedule [Please note that this reading schedule is subject to revision until the final syllabus is distributed at our first meeting.] Week 1: Introduction Course business, seminar assignments Overview of readings; introductory material on Rome, Roman Britain, Medieval perspectives (e.g., Geoffrey of Monmouth), and Renaissance England Mock seminar Week 2: When is Rome? Where is Antiquity? Dante, The Divine Comedy [Inferno 1: Text], trans. Charles S. Singleton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), cantos 1-4. Petrarch, Letter to Giovanni Colonna di San Vito, Rerum familiarum libri 6.2. Sigmund Freud, A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth, ), 22: The Dream of the Emperor Maxen and Lludd and Llefelys, from The Mabinogion, trans. Sioned Davies (Oxford 2008), , Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, for the use of all soche as are studious of Eloquence, set forthe in Englishe, by Thomas Wilson And now newlie sette forthe again, with a Prologue to the Reader (London: John Kingston, 1560), preliminaries [Title Page-Avi r ]. [STC 2 nd ed ] Leonard Barkan, Introduction and Discoveries, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), xxi-xxxiii, Week 3: Pastoral, Commentary, and the Cult of the Ancient Book Virgil, The Eclogues, trans. Guy Lee, Rev. ed. (London: Penguin, 1984). [ISBN X] Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender

4 After Rome 4 Leonard Barkan, Erotic Humanism (1), Erotic Humanism (2), Transuming Passion: Ganymede and the Erotics of Humanism (Stanford University Press, 1991) 48-59, Seminar 1: Seminar 2: Week 4: Amo magistrum: I Love the Master (1) Roger Ascham, The Bringing Up of Youth, Imitatio, The Schoolmaster, ed. Lawrence V. Ryan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press for The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1967), 3-75, Alan Stewart, Traitors to Boyes Buttockes: The Erotics of Humanist Education, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton University Press, 1997), Week 5: Epic and Eros Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Alan Mandelbaum (University of California Press), Books 1-6. Augustine, Confessions, trans. F.J. Sheed, rev. ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, Aeneid 2 & 4, Poems, ed. Emrys Jones (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), A.M. Keith, Over Her Dead Body, Engendering Rome: Women in Latin Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Week 6: Forgetting Epic Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Alan Mandelbaum (University of California Press), Books Spenser, The Faerie Queene: Book 2, ed. Erik Gray (Hackett, 2006). David Quint, Epic and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), Week 7: Amo magistrum: I Love the Master (2) Marlowe, All Ovids Elegies (London, 1603). [STC 2 nd ed.] Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis Lynn Enterline, Rhetoric, Discipline, and the Theatricality of Everyday Life in Elizabethan Grammar Schools, From Performance to Print in Shakespeare s England: Redefining British Theatre History, eds. Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2006), Wayne Rebhorn, Bound to Rule, The Emperor of Men s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995),

5 After Rome 5 Week 8: Tragedy (1) Seneca his tenne tragedies, translated into Englysh (London, 1581). [STC 2 nd ed ] Jessica Winston, Seneca in Early Elizabethan England, Renaissance Quarterly 59 (2006): Week 9: Tragedy (2) Seneca his tenne tragedies, translated into Englysh (London, 1581). [STC 2 nd ed ] Week 10: Shakespeare, Hamlet Week 11: Shakespeare, Cymbeline Week 12: What Gets Dug Up Browne, Hydriotaphia, The Garden of Cyrus, Musaeum Clausum, or, Bibliotheca Abscondita: Containing Some remarkable Books, Antiquities, Pictures and Rarities of several kinds, scarce or never seen by any man now living, Selected Writings, ed. Sir Geoffrey Keynes (University of Chicago Press, 1968), , No seminars