English 45B

Other Readings and Media

Behn, A.: Oroonoko; Pope, A.: The Rape of the Lock; Montagu, Elizabeth Mary Wortley: Selected Poems; Defoe, D.: Moll Flanders; Johnson, Samuel: Selected Works; Equiano, O.: The Interesting Narrative of the Live; Wheatley, P.: Selected Poems; Jefferson, T.: Selected Works; Wordsworth, W. and Coleridge, S.: Lyrical Ballads; Austen, J.: Emma

Description

As we read works produced in a period of often tumultuous change, we shall consider those works as zones of contact, reflecting and sometimes negotiating conflict. In a world of expanding global commerce (imports like tea suddenly become commonplace in England), political revolution (English, French, American), and changing conceptions of what it means to be a man or woman (a new medical discourse wants to view them as categorically distinct), increasingly available printed texts become sites of contestation—including debates about what constitutes “proper” language itself. We shall think about the ways in which separate groups—British and African, masters and slaves, slave owners and abolitionists, arch capitalists and devout religious thinkers, Republicans and Conservatives, and men and women—use writing to devise ongoing relationships with each other, often under conditions of inequality. Throughout we shall be especially attuned to formal choices—from linguistic register to generic conventions—and how writers deploy these to incorporate opposition, resist authority or authorize themselves. Requirements will include two papers, a mid-term, a final, and occasional quizzes.

NOTE: This class will meet for the first time on Monday, August 30; discussion sections will not be held on Friday the 27th.