ENGL 385-02, Advanced Literary Topics: Seventeenth Century Revolutions

Abstract

This course has a few primary goals. It aims first of all to develop your skills as researchers in the fields of literary history and literary criticism. This course will give you practice in doing close analyses of different texts, investigating alternative interpretations of a literary work, and situating your ideas about a text in a larger critical dialogue. It also will raise some of the big philosophical questions that underlie the study of literature: What, for instance, is “literature,” and how is it different from other kinds of writing? What makes one interpretation of a text better than another? Because we need a context for these questions, this course also examines the effects in literature of two seventeenth-century revolutions--a scientific revolution that dramatically altered how people perceived the earth’s place in the cosmos and a political revolution that temporarily disestablished monarchy in England and created a republic in its place. We will read early modern works of science fiction, poems about alchemy and the planets, scientific and political treatises, and an epic that imagines the creation of the cosmos and the first (failed) revolution. As we construct our own interpretations of these works, we will practice seeing how they reply to each other and how they reflect their extraordinary historical contexts.