401-01 Special Studies in British Literature

The Canterbury Tales & Chaucer, Pilgrim and Poet

Dr. Patricia Bart

MW 2:30-3:45

Prerequisite: English 310 or permission of instructor

Coming from a family in the wine business, Chaucer's life's pilgrimage saw him as a prisoner of war, a student of Latin, French and Italian, a diplomat, a courtier-and most of all a survivor in a turbulent age that saw the Great Schism, the Black Death and the first half of the Hundred Years' War. In the course we will consider the Tales from the perspective of language, textual studies, genre, and sources and analogues-but also with some consideration of their author, his life and ambitions. Chaucer understood himself as a poet in the company of Virgil, Ovid, Homer, Lucan and Statius, yet he also presents himself as rather a bumbler among the Pilgrims. Is Chaucer simply at play on his fictional pilgrimage, or do his Tales allow him to take positions on the issues of his day under a certain jester-like guise? What does he really think about merry widows?  Members of religious orders? Lawyers? Merchants? Cooks? Soldiers? Saints? Foxes? Roosters? Hens? God? And what can we know about who he really was?

401-02 Special Studies in British Literature

Tudor and Stuart Drama - Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

Dr. Debi Belt

MWF 11:00-11:50

Prerequisite: English 320 or permission of instructor

A study of selected works by such major dramatists of Shakespeare's time as Marlowe, Jonson, Webster, Middleton, Dekker, Fletcher, and Ford, as well as such minor writers as Greene and Kyd. For purposes of comparison we shall read a couple of Shakespeare's plays, but the course will focus primarily on those strange but compelling also-rans who helped form the background against which Shakespeare's own work took shape and who in turn were influenced by the works of the major playwright of the age. We shall meet stage versions of such real-life celebrities as Moll Frith, the smoking, drinking, duelling Annie Oakley of her day, and read such responses to Shakespeare's own early work as John Fletcher's "The Woman's Prize: The Tamer Tam'd," a sequel to "The Taming of the Shrew." We'll watch both John Webster and Anonymous fashion chilling and controversial dramas out of sensational crimes ripped from Italian and English news reports and read Middleton and Rowley's account of a bored adolescent's successful attempt to have her father's choice for her husband murdered in order to marry the man she thinks is the love of her life.  Since the non-Shakespearean drama of the period is an acquired taste, preference will be given to students who have completed English 320.

401-03 Special Studies in British Literature

The Eighteenth Century

Dr. Jim Juroe

M 6:00-9:00

In an effort to define its essence, the English restoration and 18th century has been given a number of labels, including The Enlightenment, The Augustan Age, The Age of Reason, and the Neo-classical Age. But in fact, much of the literary output of the age is far too various and contradictory to be comfortably subsumed under any such labels. In fact such labels often misrepresent the actual state of things, as suggested by just two of many possible examples:   Swift's relentless attacks on Cartesian reasoning and the coming to eminence of that new literary hero of stage and fiction, the "man of feeling." In our excursion this semester, we will consider a variety of individual works which defy easy classification, but which when assembled contribute to a fuller, richer mosaic of  the mind and art of the era.

We may conveniently commence our study this semester with an account of the "revolution" that marks the beginning of the period--the eye witness account from the great diary of Pepys detailing the signal political event of the times: the return of the exiled Stuart monarchy to England in the person of Charles II. Through his personal encouragement and patronage, a whole new generation of court writers emerged, including  the names of several dramatists we will study this semester--Wycherly and Congreve. Determinedly materialistic and hedonistic, the Restoration dramatists, after several decades of unprecedented artistic and personal debauchery (the "merry prince" set the pace with his 14 bastards), were finally confronted and routed by Jeremy Collier's "...Profaness of the English Stage," a broadside which catalogued, then denounced their offences to religion and morality--"the steaming ordures of the stage."

We will read selected passages from the court philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, "the devil of Malmesbury," who defined man as a creature infinitely grasping, deceptive, cruel, and egotistical.  Then we will sample the surprisingly large body of literature produced by the tender-minded rationalizers who sought to rebut Hobbes and his cynical, sardonic sidekick, Bernard Mandeville. In place of the ancient Christian definition of human nature, a definition as old as Jeremiah, St. Paul, and Augustine, the age's apostles of "good nature" offer instead a Pelagian construct, a creature born naturally good and given to good works and tears--the certain sign of inner virtue--that flow in torrents in the presence of objects of deserving pity. The type pervades the literature of the era.

We will confront this new species of weeping hero in various numbers of Addison and Steele's "The Spectator Papers," Steele's "The Conscious Lovers," and Mackenzie's "Man of Feeling." To better understand this wholly new literary type, we will study the psychology of benevolence in the muddy prose of the third Earl of Shaftsbury and consider the ethics of benevolence as they become moral imperatives trumpeted from thousands of pulpits by such Latitudinarian divines of the Anglican church as Tillotson and Barrow. To aid us in our study, we will rely on the magisterial study and landmark in the history of ideas, R.S. Crane's "Toward a Genealogy of the 'Man of Feeling.'"

Those opposing such radically secularized and sentimental notions of human nature comprise what we might call the tough-minded tradition.  It is an artistic brotherhood  who defend the ancient wheel of Christian orthodoxy and its stark, unsentimental conviction that man is a fallen, unregenerate, creature in desperate need of divine grace.  Those names comprising this tradition include such giants as Dryden and the great Tory satirists, particularly Swift, whose "Gulliver's Travels" we will study in depth. The satires of the Tory satirists will comprise a major focus of the course.

In that same tough-minded tradition is Samuel Johnson, who towers over the last quarter of the 18th century and stands--despite his shrill feminist detractors--as one of the towering figures in all of English Literature.  We see him as he comes to vital life through the pages of Boswell's great biography and will trace his thinking as a Christian moralist as it emerges in such works as "Rasselas" and "The Rambler." We will test the claim that Johnson commands reverence and respect as one of England's preeminent literary critics by a careful examination of his "Lives of the Poets" and his Shakespeare criticism.

Although I have charted a general path through the age focusing on major writers and themes, we will sample a wide array of writers whose works will help convey the astonishing variety, depth, and energy of the age.  These will include Sprat, Rochester, Locke, Toland, DeFoe, Fielding, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Burke, John Wesley, Adam Smith, Hume, and Gray.

The final meeting of the class will be an extravagant banquet  featuring a menu for an actual meal eaten by Pepys at the famous Cheshire Cheese and recorded in his Diary. The banquet will be followed by a screening of "Tom Jones," the academy award winner for the best film of 1963. We will have studied the Fielding novel on which the film is based--a novel many assert to be "the greatest ever written."

402-01 Special Studies in American Literature

ALL THAT’S KIND TO OUR MORTALITIES;  ALL THAT’S UNKIND TO OUR MORTALITIES: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HERMAN MELVILLE

Dr. Daniel Sundahl

MWF 1:00-1:50

Melville wrote to Hawthorne in the summer of 1851, while in the midst of Moby-Dick: “What I feel most moved to write, that is banned-and will not pay.  Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot.”

A survey of the works of Melville confirm that he felt compelled to reach out constantly in his writing for new dimensions of experience, new exertions of mind, new horizons of insight-to take the adventurous but radically dangerous way, and to risk, as he was perfectly aware that he would, literary defeat and public alienation.  There’s an American Literature seminar embedded in that.

More imaginatively, one wonders if these two fundamentally opposed views of Melville’s literary career (the safe and the daring) are reflected, along with other alternative modes of life, in the great contrast between the harbor and the open sea described by Ishmael in chapter 23 of Moby-Dick. “The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities.”

But ships must leave harbor just as a writer of the stature of Herman Melville must flee the easy channels of expression; for

…all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the slavish shore. But as in landlessness along resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God-so, better is it to perish in the howling infinite than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!

So, what to read in this seminar:

Typee

Redburn (likely)

White-Jacket (also likely)

Moby-Dick

Pierre, or the Ambiguities

Israel Potter (likely)

The Piazza Pieces

The Confidence Man

Clarel

Billy Budd

402-02 Special Studies in American Literature

The Southwestern Humorists and the Dialectal or Vernacular Tradition in Southern Literature

Dr. Michael M. Jordan

MWF 2:00-2:50

This course can satisfy the English 404 category.

In this course we will be concerned with the use of dialect (as opposed to conventional literary language) in the Southwestern Humorists and later literature of the American South. We will investigate the formal characteristics of dialect in various works: differences between dialectal expression and conventional literary language in vocabulary or diction, in idioms, in grammar and syntax, in pronunciation, and in spelling. We will also discuss the historical, political, artistic, and religious causes stimulating or encouraging the manifestation of dialectal literature (democracy and egalitarianism, Romanticism and Realism, Christianity). We will mainly be interested in the use of dialectal literature to express a variety of literary effects: the comic, the satiric, the tragic, the sublime, the beautiful, etc., the success or failure of dialectal literature in expressing various tones, moods, themes. Is dialectal literature successful in expressing various literary effects and themes? Is it as successful as those works that use conventional or standard literary language?

We will investigate these concerns in the writings of Southwestern Humorists (Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson Jones Hooper, T. B. Thorpe, George Washington Harris, and others), of Local Color writers (Mary Noailles Murfree, Joel Chandler Harris, and Kate Chopin), and of four “classic” Southern writers (Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Robert Penn Warren).

Likely texts for the course:       

*Humor of the Old Southwest, edited by Hennig Gohen and William Dillingham (University of Georgia Press)

*The Literary South, edited by Louis D. Rubin (Louisiana State University Press)

*The Portable Mark Twain, edited by Tom Quirk (Penguin Books)

*The Portable Faulkner, edited by Malcolm Cowley (Penguin Books)

*Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works, collected by Sally Fitzgerald (The Library of America)

*Brother to Dragons, by Robert Penn Warren (Louisiana State University Press)

402-03 Special Studies in American Literature

American Fiction Since 1980

Dr. John Somerville

MW 2:00-3:15

In this course we will take a look at some of the significant American authors of the past quarter century. Among those whom we may read are Don Delillo, T. Corraghassen Boyle, Ron Hansen, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth, Louise Erdrich, Nicholson Baker, John Updike, Thomas McGuane, Cynthia Ozick, and Marilynne Robinson.

403-01 Special Studies in Western Literature

Love and Liberty in Literature

Dr. Nathan Schlueter

TTh       9:30-10:45

LOVE and LIBERTY are two subjects of perennial human concern. What exactly is love, that persistent reminder of human neediness in the human soul, so mysterious it has sometimes been represented as demonic or divine, and so powerful it has been credited with both the destruction of cities and the healing of the cosmos? And what is liberty, whose noble aspiration to self-mastery and self-sufficiency often comes at the cost of friendship, happiness, and even life itself? What is the relationship between these two fundamental aspects of human experience, and in what respects do they implicate others? Do civilized communities have an interest in controlling and educating love and liberty? What does such an education look like, and what role do the law and the imagination play in that education? What are the prospects for success and what are the dangers?

In this course we will explore these and other questions through the careful study of some great literary works which treat love and liberty as their primary subject.

Possible works we will study include:

1) Genesis 2:4 - 4:2; The Song of Songs, The Gospel of St. John, 1 Corinthians

2) Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics (especially Books VIII and IX)

3) Plato, Symposium

4) Machiavelli, The Mandragola

5) Shakespeare, Sonnets 18, 115, 116, 129

6) Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece

7) Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

8) Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

9) Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing

10) C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

11) John Paul II, The Theology of the Body (excerpts)

12) Allan Bloom, Love and Friendship

13) J.J. Rousseau, Emile (especially Book V)

14) Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

15) Leo Tolstoi, Anna Karenina

16) Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

17) Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter

597-02

The Theological Imagination of C. S. Lewis

Dr. Michael Ward

MWF 3:00-5:00

This one-hour credit course meets October 13 to October 25.

An in-depth look at how Lewis understood the imagination and its relationship with reason and faith.  After examining how Lewis theorised these things, the course will turn to a series of case-studies, investigating how he applied and practised his theories in fiction, poetry, and, to a lesser extent, his Christian apologetics.

Reading list:

The Narnia Chronicles

The Ransom Trilogy

Till We Have Faces

Collected Poems

Mere Christianity

Miracles: A Preliminary Study

Upper-Level Summer School Offerings

First Session (12-30 May 2008)

320-01 Renaissance British Literature

Dr. Stephen Smith

9:00-12:00 Daily

360-01 American Literature: 1820-1890

Dr. John Somerville

9:00-12:00 Daily

370-01 American Literature: 1890-present

Dr. John Reist

9:00-12:00 Daily

401-01 Special Studies in British Literature

Shakespeare

Dr. Andrew Moran

9:00-12:00 Daily

No other poet so fulsomely and compellingly represents the field of experience as does Shakespeare, and Shakespeare is for us Anglophones what Homer was for the Greeks: the primary teacher about the world, a guide, a mentor, and maybe even for a few devoted readers, a friend. As with Cleopatra, “[a]ge cannot wither [him], nor custom stale [his] infinite variety.” Our discussions will seek to mirror this infinite variety by remaining open to whatever in the cornucopia of his interests students may find worth investigation, including Shakespeare’s theological, philosophical, historical, and political concerns. Yet to give the class focus and to gain clarity, we will especially address what may well be Shakespeare’s chief preoccupations: love, power, dramatic representation, and the nexus of these three. Shakespeare, a man of the theatre, an actor and a producer as well as a playwright, again and again returns to the theatre itself as a subject for his own dramatic representations. Indeed, for Shakespeare theology, philosophy, history, and politics are inextricably linked to, possibly even dependent upon, mimêsis. In order to reflect on these topics, the course will also briefly treat Shakespeare’s biography and his historical, theological, and dramatic contexts.

403-01 Special Studies in Western Literature

The Bible as Literature

Dr. Justin Jackson

1:00-4:00 Daily

This course is designed to give the student a solid literary foundation in a broad range of  Biblical texts and will provide her with various examples of modes of Biblical exegesis-from early rabbinic sources and from sources from the early Christian Church.  We will read selections from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, as wells as biblical literature from the intertestamental period.  Additionally, we will study the physical setting of the biblical narratives, the various literary and poetical forms employed, cultural / historical settings, and important mythic and anti-mythic narrative patterns throughout.

JRN 314-01 Prose Style

Professor Tracy Simmons

9:00-12:00 Daily

This course satisfies an English 404 requirement. Permission of instructor required.

Second Session (June 2-June 20)

350-01 American Literature: 1620 to 1820

Dr. John Reist

9:00-12:00 Daily