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.
A blog about Renaissance literature and academic life
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Class Dismissed: Affirmative Action at Elite Universities
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.
Saturday, November 17, 2012
Ovid in England Syllabus
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From the University of Iowa's copy of Metamorphoseon, Antonio Tempesta, Amsterdam, 1606 |
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: 16th and 17th 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
Friday, November 9, 2012
The Beginning of Now: Contemporaneity in Early Modern Writing
The 2012 MLA saw the advent of special areas set aside for blogging and tweeting, recognizing a basic fact of twenty-first century life in the developed world: we are obsessed with the present and increasingly aware of the way social networks inflect our understanding of it. When did this happen? We may find a clue in Harry Berger Jr.’s insight that during the early modern period “changing conceptions of self and experience at some time penetrated the practice of lyric poetry so that the poem was conceived not merely as a report of prior experience but as the unfolding of experience itself” (Revisionary Play, 135).
I've organized a special session for this year's Modern Languages Association (MLA) conference in Boston, with papers that address the social networks, epistolary practices, and lyric structures that drive this development, which they identify across various genres of seventeenth century writing.
The panel, on "The Beginning of Now: Contemporaneity in Early Modern Writing," will take place 8.30-9.45 am, Sunday Jan. 6, in Back Bay D, at the Sheraton Hotel. I'm looking forward to fantastic papers by Barbara K. Lewalski (Harvard), Daniel Shore (Georgetown), Christopher Warren (Carnegie Mellon), and Rachael Scarborough-King (NYU).
These
three papers expand our concepts of contemporaneity and the ways it was formed
and represented in early modern writing.
Together, they both address this issue in a very specific and focused
moment, from 1640-1674, and open up larger questions about the way we define
literature, influence, and context.
I've posted the abstracts below:
Barbara K. Lewalski, Current Political Events as Literary Subject: Sidney to Milton
After a brief account of the intense interest in, and some vehicles for, conveying news in Early Modern England, I pose the question, could current news be used as a literary subject? Noting theoretical statements by Sidney and Tasso discouraging such use. I then consider briefly some literary genres that traditionally deal with contemporary matter if not precisely with news--encomiastic odes, poems celebrating royal events, satire—and some literary kinds (pastoral, allegory, roman a clef) that wererecognized as means to treat contemporary matters seen as liable to censorship or punishment. Some examples include:Sidney’s Old Arcadia, Spenser’s Mother Hubbard’s Tale, and the May and July Eclogues in his Shepheard’s Calender, Wroth’s Urania. Allegory in Spenser’s epic-romance, the Faerie Queene, allowed him to present Queen Elizabeth under several personae and to include real as well as fictional personages and events of her reign and times.
But my principal focus is on eight of Milton’s 23 sonnets, those written during the Civil War and Interregnum (1642-1660) that take contemporary events as subject without the cover of pastoral or allegory. This is new in itself, as well as marking a new and radical transformation of the small sonnet genre, normally concerned to analyze private love or religious devotion. These eight poems bear titles in Milton’s Trinity Manuscript that point to their specific occasions: Sonnet VIII deals with the threatened royalist assault on London, Sonnets XI and XII satirize those who attacked Milton’s Divorce tracts, a sonetto caudato denounces the persecuting Presbyterians, the Sonnets to Fairfax, Cromwell, and Vane urge their attention to securing religious liberty, and the magnificent sonnet on the Waldensian Massacre conjoins imagery from contemporary news accounts with biblical prophecy. I suggest that Milton’s strategy for turning the usually intimate sonnet genre to these new public purposes was to dramatize his speaker’s very personal response to the particular event or crisis, often making that event a lens through which to read public danger. Yet Milton evidently decided not to tie these sonnets permanently to the current events that evoked them In his published volumes of poetry (1645 abd 1673) he titled them (except for the Waldensian sonnet) by numbers only, thereby allowing them to speak to new circumstances. Poetry, he seems to signal by this gesture, can give the “news” much wider application.
Rachael Scarborough King ‘I take up my pen to write’: Writing to the Moment in Early Modern Letters
This paper
explores the development of the epistolary technique of “writing to the moment”
as a model for a discourse of contemporaneity in seventeenth-century news
periodicals. The new genres of printed news that developed in the seventeenth
century were fundamentally epistolary in nature; they used letters and the
postal system to obtain news for publication, format texts, and circulate
documents to readers. Readers expected to see real and fictional letters
constantly appearing in newsbooks and pamphlets, especially during periods of political
upheaval. At the same time, “familiar” letter-writing was becoming a widespread
social practice. Individual authors and pedagogical texts adopted a less formal
style that stressed letters’ “conversational” nature. Dorothy Osborne’s letters
to Sir William Temple, dating from 1652-54, offer an early example of the
convention of writing to the moment, a move in which the writer figures
letter-writing as an ongoing part of everyday life. “Just now I was interrupted”;
“I have been called away twenty times since I sat down to write”; “my eyes are
so heavy that I hardly see what I write”: in these and many other examples,
Osborne creates a metadiscourse on her own writing that fuses communication
with timeliness. Each letter is precisely located in time and unfolds over
time, allowing Osborne to depict her correspondent as a constant presence. In
this paper, I will read Osborne’s letters alongside contemporary newsbooks and
pamphlets to argue that the conventions of letter-writing—particularly that of
writing to the moment—developing in manuscript and print offered ways to depict
the contemporaneous unfolding of news events. Writing to the moment allowed
printers to figure their news as constituting the “freshest advices”; simultaneously,
the epistolary status of printed news affected the style and content of
personal, handwritten letters and the ways people represented their everyday
activities in writing.
Christopher Warren and Daniel Shore, Locality and Contemporaneity in the Early Modern Social Network
Our paper will argue that mapping out the associations that composed the early modern social network forces us to rethink many of our basic assumptions. More specifically, it will revise the concepts of “the local” and “the contemporary.” In the early 1980s, New Historicism established the primacy of these concepts as the measures of contextual relevance. We may think here of Clifford Geertz’s “local knowledge,” or Steven Greenblatt’s “particular and local pressures.” The New Historicism did not merely assert the local as the most relevant context of understanding but implicitly defined context as the local and the contemporaneous, such that “to historicize,” or “to contextualize” means to reinsert a work into its most proximate time and place. When more distant contexts become relevant, they do so only through the mediation of local ones. Historicists of all stripes have generally deployed an unreflective notion of “the local” and “the contemporaneous,” such that relevance can be thought of as a rough product of proximity: as a set of progressively larger circles centered on a spatiotemporal point. We contend, by contrast, that the local and contemporaneous are not merely given by mapped space or clock time, but are instead produced by social networks. Information, objects, and persons travel along a network’s edges, generating the local and the contemporary in the process. While this reversal is especially manifest with digital networks like Facebook, it has been true for as long as it has been possible to communicate through signs at a distance. Reconstructing the early modern social network can thus allow us to revisit and revise our understanding of a work’s context. Networks that stretch across epochs, nations, and continents show how relevant context breaks free of an unreflective notion of the local or the contemporary, redefining the terms so as to include, respectively, the trans-epochal and the trans-national.
For the purposes of this paper, our examples will primarily be concerned with John Milton and his associates, and our theory of networks will be primarily drawn from the work of Bruno Latour.
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