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The program in Renaissance and 17th Century English Literature at SIUC combines close readings of texts by canonical as well as non-canonical authors, with a range of critical approaches, including new historicism, gender studies, cultural studies, and postmodernism. While specific offerings vary from year to year, the Renaissance area offers courses organized around various authors--Shakespeare, Milton, Metaphysical poets, women writers, Spenser--offered at various levels of critical theory. While seminal critical essays are recommended and sometimes required, 400-level courses, also available to upperclassmen, are primarily oriented towards close readings of Renaissance texts, especially Shakespeare. 500-level courses tend to be more theory intensive. A 400-level course in Shakespeare is offered every semester. The topic of the annual 500-level seminar varies; recent seminar topics include "Spenser," "Subjectivity and History in Seventeenth Century Poetry," "Shakespeare and Postmodernism." Special topics courses have also been offered, such as "Women's Autobiographical Writings from the Fourteenth through the Seventeenth Centuries."
Seminars
Shakespeare in the New Millennium: This course seeks answers to the question of what "Shakespeare" means in our contemporary culture. His plays are immensely popular today and appear in innumerable forms and adaptations, including in theater, in translation (into over 95 languages) and in film. The first half of this course will outline the theoretical and historical framework of our discussions on "Shakespeare." In the second half of the course, we will discuss various film and theatrical adaptations. We will also attend a current theater production in the St. Louis area. We will primarily focus on Hamlet and several of its 20th (and 21st) century appropriations, thus following through on the ways in which contemporary cultural changes determine our Shakespeare interpretations as well.
Spenser: This course engages Spenser's texts, including the entire Faerie Queene, from a variety of critical perspectives, including new criticism, new historicism, feminism, post-colonialism, and Marxism. Post-colonialist and Irish studies emerge strongly in our study of Spenser's View of the Present State of Ireland, a tract that advocates harsh measures, such as starvation, against the early modern Irish. For the uncompromising View, as for the multi-layered allegory of the Faerie Queene and the seductive lyrics of the "Amoretti," the class will explore what designs texts have upon readers, and what designs readers have upon texts. Women's Autobiographical Writings from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries: This course provides an opportunity to apply recent theories of autobiography by such critics as James Olney, Domna Stanton, and Felicity Nussbaum to autobiographical writings by Margery Kempe (medieval mystic), Margaret Hoby (Puritan gentlewoman), Margaret Ferneseed (burned as a witch), Isabella Whitney (servingwoman), Aemilia Lanier (professional writer), Lady Anne Clifford (countess), Margaret Cavendish (duchess in exile), Lucy Hutchinson (wife of Puritan colonel), Anne Halkett (Royalist activist), Mary Wroth (romance writer), and Elizabeth Cary (Catholic recusant). The course explores the autobiographical act itself: in what ways does the writing impose (or reveal) a coherence in the writer's life? What elements within that autobiography challenge or threaten that coherence? The selections from Wroth and Cary provide opportunities to explore the relationship between between autobiography and fiction.
Shakespeare and Postmodernism: This course pairs four Shakespeare plays and four critics or critical areas to explore the problem: to what extent can an early modern text be considered as postmodern? To what extent can do early modern understandings of the subject resist or lend themselves to postmodern theories of subjectivity? These four pairings of play and critic foreground four essential sites of subjectivity within the postmodern condition: maternity (with Kristeva and Midsummer Night's Dream), politics (with Bakhtin and Henry IV pt. 1), sexuality (with Foucault and Twelfth Night), and interiority (with post-modernist theorists and Hamlet).
Subjectivity and History in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry: This seminar offered a theoretically informed reassessment of "metaphysical poetry" and explored how the period's developing historical consciousness (as shaped by political and religious controversy, the rise of middle class culture, changing modes of production and exchange, and emerging problems of sexual politics) inflected the inscription of subjectivity in the poetry of Donne, Herbert, Marvell, and their contemporaries. Apocalyptic Politics: Milton and Political Radicalism: John Milton’s contention, in The Christian Doctrine, that hatred of God’s enemies is a religious duty has frequently unnerved readers and critics. In fact, several critics, even before the events of 11 September 2001, worried that Milton’s last major poem, Samson Agonistes, advocated terrorism and exonerated its violent protagonist. These debates, within Milton studies and beyond, have only intensified in recent years. In contrast to these recent quarrels about the political import of Milton’s work, Samson Agonistes, Paradise Regained, and Paradise Lost have all, at one time or another, been interpreted as retreats from the world of politics and affairs of state. Often, such interpretations describe Milton as awaiting the second coming of Christ and thus divorced from day-to-day political engagements. In other words, the assumption in such criticism is that one cannot both eagerly anticipate the end of the world and still participate in it. This seminar seeks to explore the type of political engagement present in Milton’s major poems. How do they describe political involvement? Does reading these poems have any political effect, then or now? What is the relationship between literature and politics? In order to answer any of these questions, we’ll need to examine Milton’s changing conceptions of history, ethical action, and freedom. Thus, in conjunction with the three major poems, we’ll read some of Milton’s political prose on subjects as diverse as republican democracy, the life of books, and companionate marriage. And of course, we will also examine important critical work on Milton’s political investments.
Recent MA Theses
Jane Osborne, "Eating Disorders in the Book Of Margery Kempe." Paul Odney, "Normalizing the Upper Class: Susanna Centlivre's The Gamester and The Basset-Table." Adam Wilson, "Transforming Shakespeare's Macbeth and Hamlet." Courtney Ann Wind, "Notes of Dissonance: Exploring Song as Device in Shakespearean Drama." Megan Elisabeth Reed, "'A blank, my lord': Ovid and Performance in Twelfth Night." Julian Bukalski, "Early America in Milton: Miltonic Anxiety over America as Ideal State And Milton as 'American.'
Recent PhD Dissertations
Al Nicholai, Shakespeare's Winter's Tale and Anti-theatrical Tracts. Cathy Upham, The Role of Rhetorical Identity in Shakespeare's Troilus And Cressida. Nancy McNeely, Woman's Quest for Identity: Folktale and Fairy-tale Archetypes in Shakespearean Comedy and Romance. Leslie Taylor, The Mind-Body Duality in Spenser's Faerie Queene.
Faculty
Michael Cudahy
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