ENGL 524

Spring 2014 All Classes

All Classes

Seminar in 17th C Literature

Credit: 4 hours.

May be repeated if topics vary. Prerequisite: A college course devoted entirely to an aspect of Renaissance studies or consent of instructor.

My Favorites

My Schedule

Section Status updates every 10 minutes.

ENGL 524 class schedule data for spring 2014
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	32264	Lecture-Discussion	R	1:00PM -2:50PM	T	125 English Building	Gray, C	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/21/14-05/07/14 Section Title: Early Modern War Stories Section Info: Topic Section R: Early Modern War Stories, 1600-1670 One influential narrative of European literature locates its origins in a war story. Homer?s Illiad registers the mesmerizing spectacle of bloody conflict, the insistent need to contain that conflict within generic and narrative frames of understanding, and the way that the trauma of war repeatedly resists representation?edging into the formlessness of grief-stricken silence or sublime incomprehension. However, Homer?s epic is of course just one story in a long and incredibly varied body of war literature, one small part of which we will explore in this class. Reading a variety of genres from 1600-1670, we will follow early modern political theorists, playwrights, and poets as they attempt to develop theories of just warfare; to imagine, define, and aestheticize armed violence; to contrast war to a shifting array of its antitheses (peace, civil society, georgic productivity, romance); to establish (and blur) friend/enemy distinctions; to think about war?s role in narratives of national, racial and gender identity; to represent the physical costs and supposed ideological gains of combat injury and death. To tackle these questions, we will begin by testing the ideas of some modern scholars and theorists of war violence and trauma, such as Judith Butler and Elaine Scarry. We will also read parts of the classical epics by Homer and Virgil that provided such influential models for later written and performed versions of armed violence. We will then move to one famous Renaissance theorist of war, its practice and political applications, Machiavelli, reading selections not only from The Prince but also from his lesser known works: Discourses and The Art of War. We will consider the spectacle of military violence as it appeared on the London stage in early seventeenth-century London, focusing in particular on two of Shakespeare?s most compelling studies of armed masculinity, Macbeth and Coriolanus. The second half of the course will be devoted to studying the memoirs, political treatises, poems, and closet dramas written during the British Civil Wars (1639-1651)?a period that, according to one military historian, saw ?the greatest concentration of armed violence to take place in the recorded history of the islands of Britain and Ireland? (Morrill xix). Reading works by Thomas Hobbes, John Milton, Anna Trapnel, Lucy Hutchinson, and Andrew Marvell, we will discuss the violent subjectivities, paradoxical self-divisions, bloody oppositions, and irresolvable ethical impasses that particularly attend representations of civil combat. Restriction(s): Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.