English 771-001
Literature of the English Renaissance: Early Modern Literature and Culture
Instr: Netzloff, Mark
Office: CRT 484; 229-6992
e-mail: netzloff@uwm.edu
Office hours: TBA
Course Information: R; 5:30-8:10pm; CRT 286
Course Description
A survey of writing in English in the early modern period (1500-1660), this course also offers an introduction to historicist and materialist approaches to literature and culture. One of our overarching concerns will be to historicize literary production, and we will examine the ways that practices of authorship, publication, and reading were shaped by factors such as technologies (print-capitalism), institutions (schools, the court), and associations (religious communities, the early modern theater, literary coteries). We will also discuss the impact of early modern travel, capitalism, and colonialism, analyzing the forms of writing that emerged from England's transcultural links with Ireland, Europe, and the Americas. In addition, several of our class sessions will explore the relation of literary writing to sites of power and political agency, with particular attention to the intimate, affective registers of sovereignty and the state - the connections, for instance, between histories of the family, domesticity, and the nation, as well as between sovereignty, models of friendship, and the history of sexuality.
Primary texts for the course will include prose writings by Sir Thomas More, Anne Askew, Edmund Spenser, Sir Walter Raleigh, Captain John Smith, Sir Francis Bacon, James I, John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, Anna Trapnel, and Gerrard Winstanley, two plays by Christopher Marlowe (Doctor Faustus and Edward II), and poetry by George Gascoigne, John Donne, William Shakespeare, Robert Southwell, Isabella Whitney, Elizabeth I, Lady Mary Wroth, Ben Jonson, Aemilia Lanyer, George Herbert, Anne Bradstreet, and Richard Crashaw.
Critical readings include selections from Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jurgen Habermas, Raymond Williams, Benedict Anderson, Nancy Armstrong, Mary Poovey, and Peter Stallybrass, among others.
Course work will consist of weekly e-mailed responses, a presentation, and a final, research-based paper.
