Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

The study of selected works of Early Modern poetry and prose written in English, and situated in their cultural context. May be organized by author, genre, or critical approach. Reserved for English honors, major, joint major and minor students. Students with credit for ENGL 410 may not take this course for further credit. Writing.

COURSE DETAILS:

This course holds two interrelated aims: first, to consider how seemingly recent concerns about environmental sustainability and resilience within ecological thought may have roots reaching back to the world of Renaissance literature; and second, to ask how we as located moderns living on the west coast engage with premodern thought. How might our assumptions about early modern attitudes toward animals, birds, vegetation, and the physical landscape inflect our own perception of the natural world? The course takes its structure from the pervasive scala naturae (scale of nature), what modern critics have taken to calling the Great Chain of Being, which was imagined to stretch from heaven to earth, linking God, angels, humans, worms, and stone. We will consider theories of ontology—such as what makes a being, is matter stable or metamorphic, how is change determined, and what determines humans’ relationship to their environs? As we do so, we will bear in mind environmental humanist Ursula Heise’s call for an “eco-cosmopolitanism,” that imagines the global, as time as well as geography, through a local and present frame. In our reading, we will explore some of the seminal texts of Renaissance literature—including Thomas More’s utopian experiment, Spenser’s hybrid land of the Faerie Queene, the lyric vegetal ruminations of Marvell, Montaigne’s near heretical musings on creaturely life, and Milton’s attempt to justify the ways of God to men—alongside contemporary philosophies such as vitalism, new materialism, and ecocriticism.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

RECOMMENDED READING: