English 119

Description

In this course we shall read a variety of texts that sought to represent strange new worlds—or invited readers to see their own world as strange—from Royal Society publications describing microscopic worlds to popular voyage accounts regaling readers with remote worlds, to plays, prose fiction, and poems that wrote familiar worlds anew. As we read the works of philosophers, scientists, mariners, poets, dramatists, essayists, and fiction writers we will attend to their struggle to find a language to convey these strange and estranged worlds, as they popularize new scientific discoveries, debate approaches to life in a globalizing market society, or satirize new commercial regimes as well as the promised gains of scientific observation. We shall also ask how and why so many works figured the object of knowledge and the instabilities and limits of language as female. As we interpret coffee house conversationalists, hack writers, masquerading women, naïve travellers, criminal gangs, among others, we shall be especially interested in the development of new techniques of realist writing and the complexities of the satire of this period.  

Provisional Reading: Poetry of John Dryden, Anne Finch, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Alexander Pope, John Gay, Jonathan Swift; Prose of Samuel Pepys, John Locke, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Henry Fielding; Plays of William Wycherley and John Gay.

This class satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.

The English Department is working on expanding the class size for this offering. If you would like to enroll in this course after it fills, please put yourself on the wait list, and if we are able to accommodate you, you will be added as soon as possible (no later than the first week of classes).