A Blog About Crayfish, Bacon, and Wine (But not about Food)

(crossposted at Stanford University CMEMS)

 I hate the name "locavore," perhaps because its so often used by foodies -- who generally seem to me like slimmed down versions of Ben Jonson's Sir Epicure Mammon. But in principle, as another character in Jonson's play notes, "the motion's good, and of the spirit." And if locally sourced food is a good idea, then why not locally sourced scholarship too?

For the last few years, at least, that's been my principle, and so while I continue to make my yearly pilgrimage to the British Library and Bodleian, I also try never to miss an opportunity to duck into libraries and special collections that lie off the beaten path. 

This partly reflects Thoreau's idea that we should be "the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher of [our] own oceans." I've written about how this has inflected my teaching of Shakespeare, because such collections allow us to understand how such authors have shaped the histories of our institutions and communities. But beyond this, it really is possible to find hidden treasures in smaller, regional collections. Such collections were often cobbled together with limited resources, meaning that the books are less likely to be the pristine copies we're used to seeing in the Bodleian, and more likely to be battered, well-used, and bibliographically more interesting.

[Fig. 1: Courtesy of Special Collections, LSU Libraries, Louisiana State University]

So when I was giving a talk at LSU recently, I made my way over to the lovely Hill Memorial Library, where the collections did not disappoint on either local or bibliographical interest. Where but Baton Rouge could one find "The Rendell Rhoades Crayfish Collection?" And what, pray tell, would one find in said collection?

The answer, in short, is that the collection holds basically every book that's ever mentioned a crayfish, crocodile, or crustacean, from (pseudo?) Ovid's fragmentary poem on the art of fishing, Halieutica, in a lovely 1556 edition, to Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum (1651). Rhoades was an aquaculture pioneer and obviously something of an eccentric (he also collected thousands of books on croquet, which are held at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center, in Ohio).

[Fig. 2: Conrad Gessner, Halieuticon, hoc est De piscibus libellus, multo quam ante hac emendatior & scholijs illustratus (Zurich, 1556), title page, Courtesy of Special Collections, LSU Libraries, Louisiana State University]

It only takes a single mention of crustacea to make the collection, and in fact Ovid's fragment doesn't contain any, but it is part of a polyglot edition that includes treatises on fishing and marine life in German and Latin, including the wonderful De Piscibus Marinus by Gulielmus Rondeletius (Guillaume Rondelet), a professor of medicine at Montpellier. Rondelet, who dissected his own infant son to determine the cause of his death, was an often controversial figure. But before his death in 1566 (supposedly from a surfeit of figs) he was responsible both for the anatomy theatre in Montpellier and for the fields of ichthyological and botanical research as they developed into real sciences, led by his students. From a literary perspective, it is fascinating to see Ovid's fragmentary poem paired, in the same edition, with Rondelet's taxonomic approach.

[Fig. 3: Conrad Gessner, Halieuticon, hoc est De piscibus libellus, multo quam ante hac emendatior & scholijs illustratus (Zurich, 1556), sig. F3v, Courtesy of Special Collections, LSU Libraries, Louisiana State University]

On a side note, "crocodili" is the closest the book comes to the gators that I was told, by my gracious but perhaps malingering hosts, inhabit the University Lakes. Who knows: they do have a tiger, which you can watch here.

[Fig. 4: Conrad Gessner, Halieuticon, hoc est De piscibus libellus, multo quam ante hac emendatior & scholijs illustratus (Zurich, 1556), sig. B3v, Courtesy of Special Collections, LSU Libraries, Louisiana State University]

Bacon's Sylva Sylvarum also made the collection for its brief discussion of whether crustaceans were insects or fish.
 

[Fig. 5: Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum (London, 1651), 189, Courtesy of Special Collections, LSU Libraries, Louisiana State University].

A book on the subjectivity and sexuality of early modern crayfish would seem to be in order. But the most interesting thing about the Bacon volume had nothing to do with crustaceans or fish of any kind. The Bacon book is well used -- it contains pasted-in pages, some torn pages, and a big, bold, stain:

[Fig. 6: Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum (London, 1651), 9, Courtesy of Special Collections, LSU Libraries, Louisiana State University].

What is that? I might normally guess ink, except there are no ink marks anywhere else in the volume -- no sign that a reader was pouring over it with pen poised. Might the text itself offer a clue? Here, Bacon describes an experiment in which one sets a candle inside a shallow bowl of "spirit of wine," or aqua vita -- probably a highly distilled, and flammable, brandy.  This allows Bacon to observe the effect of one flame upon another. And did a reader, following along at home, replicate the experiment? Perhaps I'm being fanciful, but I can't help but think that stain looks about right for a drop of distilled wine, hurriedly wiped from the page (the wipe mark goes down and from left to right, so that the stain tapers off at the word "remains").

Besides being of obvious local interest, in other words, the Rhoades Crayfish Collection is also a great resource in the history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century science, perhaps offering us a chance to see how books not only recorded that history, but participated in it.

Thanks very much to all the fantastic people in the LSU English Department, and the Department of Women's and Gender Studies, for showing me such a fantastic time!

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The End of Affirmative Action as We Know it? (And I Feel Ambivalent)

This Spring the Supreme Court will rule on two affirmative action cases that may end affirmative action as we know it. For those of us unabashedly liberal professorial types committed to increasing diversity on college campuses and reducing inequality in our educational system, this may in fact be a moment of great opportunity, as I argue at The New Republic. 

In the classroom as in the courts: never waste a crisis!

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Why the Humanities Must Go Local in a Global Age

(Cross posted at Stanford CMEMS)
Why, in the age of MOOCS and the Internet, should students continue to enroll in my courses and others like them? Why pay tuition for a Shakespeare class at Iowa when professor from a shiny Ivy league school will teach it to you for free? These were some of the questions I tried to answer this weekend at the first Annual Des Moines Humanities Festival at Salisbury House in Des Moines. It was a great day, with Jim Leach, a native Iowan and the chairman of the NEH, in attendance to discuss his own education in the humanistic three-R's ("In Iowa," he deadpanned, "that's readin', writin', and wrastlin'").

 [Courtesy University of Iowa Women's Archive]

The theme was "Collectors, Collections, and Collecting," and my own talk was called "Why the Humanities Must Go Local in a Global Age."  As we've all heard by now, MOOCS are going to put us all out of a job.  A single course can enroll 100,000 students or more, and when it comes to delivering information, traditional lecture courses simply can't compete, no matter how large we make them or how often we teach them: if I taught large lecture classes with 120 students, twice a semester, it would take me 208 years to teach as many students as one Coursera professor can reach with a single course. In terms of delivering information, that's a productivity increase of 83,000%; by comparison, a modern John Deere tractor, compared to plowing with a team of horses, increases efficiency by a factor of 1,500%. 

So it seems inevitable that students wanting such an education will soon seek it online.  But before humanities professors pack up our jalopies and head to California, like John Steinbeck's Joads did after the tractor took their land, I suggested that we might take another lesson from the family farm -- which has recently found new life thanks to the booming "locavore" movement taking root in restaurants and farmer's markets across the country.

When teaching Shakespeare, for example, what can we offer locally that's totally unique?  The answer goes to the nature of the humanities themselves, sending us into the archives, not in search of some unchanging Shakespeare whose "eternal summer shall not fade," but in search of a Shakespeare that has put down roots, and grown, in the Iowa soil.

As an exercise in discovering this local Shakespeare, I'm teaching a class this summer called "Study Abroad -- in Iowa," in which students will research the local archives, curate exhibitions on their findings, and hold panel discussions with local book artists and performers who draw on Shakespeare's work. To get some idea of the kinds of materials they'd be working with, I took my own trip to the University of Iowa Special Collections, where I pulled up various works, old an new.

Above, for example, is a picture of the scrapbook of the Marion, Iowa, Shakespeare Club, founded in the 1890s  for the "Intellectual improvement" of Marion's citizens. 

The women, who hailed Shakespeare as "The Bard of the Cornfields," gathered to have tea, to read Shakespeare, discuss the plays, and compose their own original poems, as well as  debating the duties of citizenship. In other words, Shakespeare was (and is) part of their broader civic engagement. 

Eventually, club members built a “Shakespeare Garden” in Marion’s Ellis park, which became a focal point for community restoration efforts after the historic floods of 2008. In a newspaper article about the rebuilding, one club member said that the group had moved away from their original insistence on plants that grew in Shakespeare's own garden in Stratford, and that their plantings now included flowers that thrive more readily in Iowa's own climate.

Here's another example of a locally remade Shakespeare, by the book artist Emily Martin.

 [Courtesy University of Iowa Special Collections]

This is an edition of Romeo and Juliet, but as you see in the picture below, it is an unusual one. Martin specializes in pop up books, and here she's chosen one line of text selected to represent each act of the play.

[Courtesy University of Iowa Special Collections]

On these side leaves (the pillars of the castle) we find variations of the Chorus' opening lines:

            Two households, both alike in dignity

            In fair Verona where we lay our scene.

            From ancient grudge to break new mutiny

            Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. (1-4)

As she moves through the play, Martin inserts modern equivalents for Verona:  "fair Bosnia," "fair Israel," "fair Rwanda," "fair America," as well as her own commentary.

In brief, I hope to facilitate such experiences of adaptation and reclamation for my own students, too.  With our emphasis on historicizing and analyzing early modern works, scholars like myself sometimes hesitate to embrace such heritage, or fail even to see it. But taking our students into the archives in this way can help demonstrate the great insight of humanism and the humanities -- that when we're reading Shakespeare we're not really processing information (in a way that we can broadcast over the web) so much as discovering ourselves and our relationship to others, past, present, and future.

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First Annual Des Moines Humanities Festival

This Saturday I'll be speaking at the first annual Des Moines Humanities Festival, at Salisbury House in Des Moines.  Organized by the Olberman Center's Teresa Mangum and Salisbury House's Director, Eric Smith.  The Des Moines Register writes about the event and interviews Eric here.  The event's theme is "Collectors, Collections, and Collecting," and the picture of Native American artifacts reproduced here comes from Salisbury House, which also holds a wide array of Shakespeareana and early books.

I'll be talking about the way Iowans have read, collected, and remade Shakespeare from some of the earliest settlers to 2012, when Iowa City book artist Emily Martin produced a fantastic pop-up version of Romeo and Juliet to enter in a bookbinding competition sponsored by Oxford University's Bodleian Library.  If you happen to be in Des Moines -- and why wouldn't you be!? -- you should get a ticket and check out the festival, which includes a lunch, reception, and brilliant talks by all us "big thinkers" (as the Register describes the speakers!). 

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Hell is for Commuters and Kings

"I can smile, and smile, and park while I smile" -- those, or something like them, were the famous words of Shakespeare's villain Richard III.  As you may have heard,  archaeologists recently discovered his bones under a municipal parking lot in England, and I've just co-written a newspaper article with Jeff Porter and Adam Hooks, my colleagues at Iowa, on the discovery here!

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Reckoning with Big Data in Little Classrooms

(cross-posted at the Stanford CMEMS)   

How much do we know about the students we teach? How much should we know? Our optimistically named "Spring" semester has just started at the University of Iowa, and this semester I asked my students to complete an online pre-course survey (through Surveygizmo.com) to find out more about their goals, their preparation, and their reasons for taking my Milton class. Some of the results were really surprising, others were disheartening, and all of them challenged me to rethink my syllabus and my approach.

Which raises a question: literary scholars like Franco Moretti have proclaimed that the age of "big data" will change the way we do literary research -- but should it also change the way we teach? It strikes me that the typical university English classroom is in many ways a data poor environment. Or rather, it is an environment rich in data that we never quantify: we constantly gauge our students' reactions -- we even collect their evaluations at the end of the semester -- but then after gaining an impressionistic sense of those evaluations, they usually go into a drawer.

 So what do you learn from surveying an incoming class like mine and then crunching the numbers?

In this case, that most of my students (63%) feel their research skills are their weakest academic area, as well as that 51% of them have never had a university class in early modern literature, including Shakespeare.

And then there's this: 

Remember, these are mostly English majors, in Iowa City, the only UNESCO City of Literature in the United States, a place where we erect sculptures of books and literally have poems engraved into the sidewalks. Yet a third of my students read books for less than 30 minutes per day -- and this led to a frank and, hopefully, productive discussion with them about how they'll have to change their reading habits to do well in a class on Milton.

Now for another unexpected result, but one that will be less likely to depress your spirits:

When asked what would improve the English courses they've taken so far, more students said "More theory discussion" (34.3%) than any other category -- although "more discussion of close reading" was a close second. I think the conventional wisdom in my department is that students have lost interest in theory (after all, it's pretty tough to digest Heidegger in 20 minutes a day!). But that response was strong enough to revise my syllabus: as I told my students, the critical history of Paradise Lost is in some sense the history of critical theory, and it is a history I'll be happy to explore with them.

I know that many of us probably consider teaching to be a bit like dancing or conducting an orchestra -- an art exempt from the age of big data. Of course, we used to think of baseball like that too, before Billy Beane showed what could be done with sabermetrics.  And this makes me wonder what might be gained, and lost, if we mined our classrooms for data in the same way we're beginning to mine the archive. 

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Young Milton

At long last, Oxford University Press today publishes Young Milton: The Emerging Author, 1620-42. Edward Jones, the editor of Milton Quarterly and sleuth responsible for dozens of new records related to Milton's life, conceived and edited the volume. Most of the essays come from the "Young Milton" conference at Worcester College, Oxford, in 2009. Although I didn't attend that conference I was fortunately able to contribute an essay on Milton's Mask (which most people know as Comus, although Milton never called it that). The book looks lovely, and it contributes to a major reassessment of Milton's early work and the mode of "authorship" that it represents. Unfortunately it is also $100.00 ... but maybe we can look forward to a paperback or digital version soon?

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The Bard of the Cornfields

This summer I'm teaching a class on Shakespeare with the theme "Study Abroad -- In Iowa." In years past I've taught summer courses in Oxford and Cambridge, always exploring the connections between authors like Milton and Shakespeare and the places in which they lived and worked. For this class I thought we would turn that concept on its head, exploring the meaning of Shakespeare, contemporary and historical, closer to home.  How have Iowans read Shakespeare throughout their history, and how has their reading shaped the state we inhabit today? What resources do we have to study Shakespeare that truly are unique to this place, and how might place figure into our reading of the plays and poems? As universities across the country embrace Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS) -- which I don't necessarily think is a bad thing -- it will be important to ask what we can do in our smaller, local classrooms that can't be done anywhere else.

For my class, we'll spend time researching in the university library's special collections (which holds a second folio and much other Shakespeareana). We'll also meet with the actors and director of the local Riverside Shakespeare Festival and take a field trip to Des Moines to visit Salisbury House, a replica Tudor mansion, complete with rare book library, built by Carl Weeks, the eccentric "cosmetics king," who had the materials for his Xanadu shipped over from England during the 1920s.  

Today I spent some time in the Iowa Women's Archives, which we'll also visit. What I found shows in some pretty concrete ways how Shakespeare is built into the material fabric of Iowa and the diverse ways that Iowa's women have responded to his work.

First I called up the scrapbook of the Marion, Iowa, Shakespeare Club, which was established in 1909, for the purpose of the "Intellectual improvement" of Marion's citizens. 

As an etiological poem (pictured above) on the group explains:

“Eight there were of the dear ‘Old Guard’

When the Shakespeare Club was born,

And the Harvest Moon rose full in the East

O’er Iowa’s golden corn.”

 

As the moon rose, the group gathered to discuss a whole series of plays: the first was Romeo and Juliet, followed by The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Macbeth, and As You Like It. 

According to their meeting minutes, the  women memorized passages, analyzed characters, composed original poems, as well as  debating the duties of citizenship and such hot button issues as whether the local school should provide cups for children. 

Although its goal was intellectual improvement, the Marion Shakespeare Club was not open to all comers.  The “Constitution and Bylaws” state, under Article III, section 1, that “The membership of this club shall be limited to fifteen in number.”

It continues:

2. All members shall be elected and selected by the club.

3. All elections must be unanimous.

4. The membership fee shall be One Dollar per year.”

After the first year, a clipping from the local paper in Jan. 3 1910 announced that  “The Shakespeare club is well pleased with the progress that has been made in the study of the beautiful English which the poet employs, and the next regular meeting will be held Jan 6....The club will attend in a body the Merchant of Venice matinee on Tuesday afternoon.”

A handwritten note identifies this as “The Merchant of Venice as produced by the Colburn Players at Greene’s Opera House," a Cedar Rapids staple that was once one of the largest venues between Chicago and Denver. Soon, Greene's began working in collaboration with the Shakespeare Club and the produced Macbeth the next year.

Eventually, club members built a “Shakespeare Garden” in Marion’s Ellis park, complete with a bust of the bard. This still exists, by the way, as does the club. The original entrance, a rustic shelter with a thatched roof, was designed by Grant Wood, but unfortunately no longer remains. The theater, the park, the archive: they all hold a distinctly Iowan Shakespeare.

While contemplating this Shakespeare, what he meant, and what he means, I also called up a box of papers that belonged to the Yiddish writer, Bertha Korn Tucker.  She's the young girl on the left rear of the photo, a daughter of Lithuanian immigrants (Sarah and Samuel Korn, center). She grew up in the Des Moines Ghetto, and from there she went to Drake University, where she penned a paper for one of her classes titled "Had I been Mrs. Shakespeare, or Had She been Me."

“Had I been Mrs. Shakespeare," Bertha begins, "Stratford-on-Avon couldn’t have held any part of me while exciting plays were being created and acted in the theatres of London...”

Bertha-as-Mrs. Shakespeare proceeds to explain to her truculent, dismissive husband the ways that she would rewrite Lear -- in large part by reconfiguring Shakespeare's female characters:  “Your alabaster Cordelia was only fit to sojurn with angels – which is where you eventually felt you must send her. But not in my – we’ll come to that later...”

The monologue is incisive and often hilarious (My favorite transition in the paper:  “I’ve been wanting to talk to you about the Fool.")  In the end of this version, Cordelia departs for France and Kent, in a gruesome bit of offstage business, stabs Lear and then himself, so that the old man will not be forced to live with his mental powers in decline.  

So what lines can we trace between the ladies of the Marion Shakespeare Club and the young, female Jewish writer who decided to rewrite Shakespeare so that his works adhered more closely, as she explained, to nature as she understood it? Are there connections between the production of the Merchant of Venice at Greene's Opera House and the voice that Bertha Korn Tucker carved out of Shakespeare's works for herself? That will be one of the questions of my class and one that may give us a new perspective on our own work as a kind of "Iowa Shakespeare Club" (perhaps we'll need to make bylaws, too...)

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Class Dismissed: Affirmative Action at Elite Universities

As the Supreme Court considers whether to ditch race-based affirmative action, a growing chorus now calls for creating diversity principles around class rather than race. I've also pitched in my two cents, drawing on my own experiences, as someone who moved from a trailer house in Oklahoma to the University of Oxford, in a current review for The New Republic of Elizabeth Aries's book, Speaking of Race and Class: The Student Experience at an Elite College.  

For me, the most fascinating aspect of Aries's book is the way it complicates the arguments for class-based affirmative action by showing that lower-income students suffer some pretty serious alienation on elite campuses. Unlike their minority peers, who often arrive on campus to an established support network, students who are poor but not minority can find themselves adrift "on another planet," as one of the students in the book relates. As with race-based affirmative action, this doesn't mean the idea should be scrapped -- but it does remind us that any effective diversity program will need to remember that "admissions" really only constitutes a small part of the college experience.

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Ovid in England Syllabus

 

From the University of Iowa's copy of Metamorphoseon, Antonio Tempesta, Amsterdam, 1606

I rarely get comments on the blog, but this week one reader asked if I'd mind posting my syllabus for my course, "Ovid in England." One reason I maintain the blog is to make public various documents that might help others in the field, including fellowship applications and book proposals (coming soon...).

So here's the syllabus, in all its ragged glory (evidently blogger won't actually let me attach files, so please excuse the formatting, which will be a little rough):
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008:122: 16^th and 17^th Century Poetry: Ovid in England

University of Iowa

Time and location: 9.30-10.45 AM T/Th, 207 EPB

Instructor: Dr. Blaine Greteman

blaine-greteman@uiowa.edu

Phone: 319-384-1860

Office Hours: 12.30-1.30 T/TH & 4.00-5.00 M, in 474 EPB, or by appointment

Ovid was the bad boy of classical poetry, and writers in Shakespeare’s England embraced his works with an unprecedented enthusiasm.  This course will ask why these writers were so drawn to Ovid’s erotic elegies, his tales of transformation, and his poetics of exile.  We’ll read Ovid’s poetry in both contemporary translations and in the ones that Shakespeare and his contemporaries knew and produced. We’ll also examine the way these writers used Ovid as the launching pad for their own imaginative efforts in works like Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and Venus and Adonis, John Donne’s elegies, and Spenser’s Faerie Queene.  What did Ovid offer these writers and why did so many of them respond to his work at this historical moment? Just as importantly, how do these Ovidian poetics speak to us now, during the only historical period that has produced as many translations and adaptations of Ovid as the Renaissance?

Required Texts:

Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A.D. Melville (Oxford, 1986; reissued 2006).

Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Barbara A. Mowat (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993) (or equivalent edition).

+ coursepack at Zephyr Copies, 124 E. Washington St.

Grades:

Participation and attendance:                           10%

Group Presentation:                                        10%

Paper 1:                                                           15%

Paper 2:                                                           25%

Midterm:                                                         15%

Final:                                                               25%

I will give “+” and “–“ grades.

A note on readings: readings marked “OM” refer to the Oxford edition of Ovid’s Metamorphosis; all others are in the reader unless otherwise noted.

week of august 20: sex, power, and poetry, or why shakespeare and his contemporaries loved ovid

Tuesday:         Course introduction; Midsummer Nights Dream, dir. Adrian Noble, 1996

Thursday:       Midsummer Night’s Dream contd. Read Midsummer Night’s Dream                                         (Mowatt) I-III.

                        Ovid, Pyramus and Thisbe (OM p. 76-79)

week of august 27:  hierarchy and the politics of translation

Tuesday:         Course [re]introduction. Midsummer Night’s Dream (IV-V).

                        Louise Adrian Montrose, “Shaping fantasies” (ICON)

Thursday:       Golding’s “Preface to the Reader” (in reader).

                        Creation and Four ages of Man (OM pg 1-14)

                        (Compare Ted Hughes and Golding on handout)

                        Raphael Lyne, “Ovid in English Translation” (ICON)

week of september 3:  the anti-epic mode and imperial tensions

Tuesday:         Apollo & Daphne; Phaeton (OM pg 14-36)

                        Heather James, “Ovid and the Question of Politics in Early Modern England” (in reader)

Metamorphosis Due (ungraded but required)

Thursday:       Arachne (OM 126-125); Spenser Muiopotmos, lines 232-440;

                       

                        Jupiter and Europa, Cadmus (OM 49-54); Hobbes, De Cive (in reader)

Topics for Paper 1 Assigned

week of september 10: sexual politics – unlicensed desire

Tuesday:                     Ovid, Heroides XVIII-XIX, Hero and Leander, trans. Daryl Hine    (in reader)

Thursday:                   Marlowe, Hero and Leander

                        Group 1: Sexual Deviance in Early Modern England

week of september 17:  moral meaning and resistance

Thursday:                   Marlowe, Hero and Leander

Tuesday:                     Chapman’s continuation of Hero and Leander (in reader)

Paper 1 Thesis Statements Due

week of september 24 : speaking through ovid

Tuesday:                     Henry Petowe’s Second Part of Hero and Leander  

           

Thursday:                  

week of october 1: protestant poetics

Tuesday:                     Ovid, Heroides XV (Sappho to Phaon); John Donne, Sappho to     Philaenis

                                    Group 2: Women Writers

           

Thursday:                   Goodnight Moon (read in class)

                                    Ovid, Metamorphosis bk. 10 (OM pg.225-51)

            Paper 1 Due

week of october 8: gardens of good and evil

Tuesday:         Spenser, Faerie Queene II.XII (Guyon, Knight of Temperance)

Thursday:       Spenser, Faerie Queene, III.vi (Birth of Belphoebe, Garden of Adonis)

                       

week of october 15: venus and adonis

Tuesday:         Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis

                        Group 3: The Plague           

Thursday:       Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis

                       

week of october 22: politics of anti-petrarchan poetry

Tuesday:         Midterm

Thursday:       Marlowe, All Ovid’s Elegies, Bk I     

                        Group 4: Petrarchan Poetry and Elizabeth’s Court

week of october 29: angry young ovidians

Tuesday:         Donne, Elegy I (Jealosie) [Compare to Amores 1.4, trans. Peter Greene]

                        Donne’s Elegy 3 “Change,”; Elegy XIX  “To His Mistress Going to Bed” /                        [Compare to Marlowe’s translation of Amores I.5]; “The                                                        Indifferent” [Compare to Marlowe’s translation of Amores 2.4]

                       

                        Group 5: Inns of Court Culture

Thursday:       Robert Herrick, “No Loathsomeness in Love”, “the Vine,” “The Night Piece, to Julia”; Thomas Carew, “A Rapture”

                       

week of november 5: deluding and dangerous art

Tuesday:         Ovid, Pygmalion (OM 232-34); John Marston, The Metamorphoses of  Pigmalion’s Image

Thursday:       George Sandys, “Philomela” and commentary, from Ovid’s  Metamorphosis Englished

                        Paper two topics due

week of november 12: uneasy ovidianism

Tuesday:         Milton’s Lycidas; Invocation to Bk. III of Paradise Lost lines 1-55)

                        For refresher, see Ovid’s “Orpheus and Eurydice” (224-28) and the conclusion to the Orpheus story248-52)

                       

                        Group 6: Puritans and Poetry

Thursday:       Ovid, Echo and Narcissus (OM 61-66); Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IV.410-504 (Eve recounts her creation and first moments in Paradise)

                       

week of november 19: break

Tuesday:         Thanksgiving holiday.

Thursday:       Thanksgiving holiday

week of november 26: eterne in mutability

Tuesday:         Ovid, Book XV (OM 352-79) Doctrines of Pythagoras

                       

                        Paper 2 Due

Thursday:       Spenser, Two Cantos of Mutabilitie

week of december 3: change and apocalypse

Tuesday:         Spenser, Two Cantos of Mutabilitie

Thursday:       Spenser continued, Final exam review

FINAL EXAM: TUESDAY 8:00-10:00 PM (yes, PM!) in 207 EPB

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