ENGL621 Readings in Renaissance British Literature: God, Nature, Labor: Three Stories of Modernity

Scholars and philosophers have often sought to understand the historical present by telling stories that begin in the early modern period, a habit crystallized in this very phrase, "early modern."

In this course, we will read a wide variety of literary and philosophical texts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, asking how they animate, inform, complicate, and/or disturb such efforts at self-explanation. The course will be divided into three sections, each of which takes up a different story of modernity: disenchantment, enlightenment, and the rise of capitalism. The point will not be to reject these narratives by revealing them to be partial, Whiggish, or teleological (though some versions of them should certainly be discarded); nor will it be simply to provide evidence of their correctness. We will take seriously the desire to pursue self-understanding by researching the pre- and early modern past, and we will aim to understand both the powers and the limits of intellectual projects that make this round-trip journey. Our focus will be England but we will also attend to continental and transatlantic developments. Readings will be drawn from figures such as Montaigne, Marie de Gournay, Spenser, Shakespeare, Bacon, Aemilia Lanyer, Descartes, Calderón, Robert Hooke, Rachel Speght, Aphra Behn, and Milton. Alongside these texts we will place the work of modern and contemporary thinkers -- from Marx, Nietzsche, Arendt, and Blumenberg to recent scholarship in early modern literary studies. Likely topics of discussion include: confessional conflict; philosophical skepticism; atheism; the emotional life of scientific practice; feminist polemic; utopian visions of labor; histories of colonialism; the role of gender in the ascription of racial identity; dispossession, vagrancy, and accumulation.

Section(s):
0101 -  David Simon