Oxford Campus, 2013 Courses
Group II (British Literature through the Seventeenth Century)
7910 Religion, Politics, and Literature from Spenser to Milton/P. McCullough
This course will set some of the greatest achievements of England's literary Renaissance in the context of religious culture under Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I (roughly 1559–1640). Our emphasis will be on the ways in which the sacred and the secular converged in early modern England and the ways that literature both influenced and was influenced by that convergence. Topics of classes will include humanism and Protestantism; religious master texts for literary language (such as the English Bible, Psalter, and Book of Common Prayer); religious satire in the theater; and religio-political deployments of epic and lyric verse.
Texts: Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poetry (any edition); Edmund Spenser, “Amoretti and Epithalamion” in The Shorter Poems, ed. Richard McCabe (Penguin); Spenser, The Faerie Queene (Book I), ed. T. P. Roche, Jr. (Penguin); John Donne, Complete English Poems, ed. C. A. Patrides and Robin Hamilton (Everyman); Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair (any edition); William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure (any edition); The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge); John Milton, “Nativity Ode,” “Lycidas,” “Comus” in Complete Poems (Oxford or Penguin). For background, The Oxford Illustrated History of Tudor and Stuart Britain, ed. John Morrill (Oxford; out of print in U.S., but used copies are available from online sources).
7919 Shakespeare's First Folio 1623/E. Smith
The collected edition of Shakespeare's plays gathered by his fellow actors in 1623 gives us 18 plays we wouldn't otherwise have, as well as new versions of some of those previously printed. It marks a landmark in the development of drama as literature, and a new cultural status for Shakespeare. This course gets under the skin of that iconic book. We'll look at original copies in Oxford libraries and learn hands-on about how it was printed in a series of practical sessions with a master printer. We’ll study the ways the printed text gives us new insight into how the plays were performed. This course approaches Shakespeare’s plays, then, via the material conditions of their transmission, drawing on theories of performance, of editing, of print technology, of book history, and of literary criticism.
Texts: Although the course encompasses aspects of all of the collected plays, there will be a particular focus on The Comedy of Errors, King Lear, Timon of Athens, Romeo and Juliet,and Richard II. Students may read the plays in any modern edition or complete works; the first folio versions will be available at Oxford.
7920 Shakespeare: On the Page and on the Stage/M. Gilbert
A play text exists on the page; a performance text exists on stage. These two versions of Shakespeare’s texts (to which we may add performances on film and video) will form the center of our work as we read and discuss play texts, and then see eight to nine productions, some in Stratford-upon-Avon, some in London. Several classes will take place in Stratford, and these will include meetings with members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, who will discuss their work in the productions. Given the traveling required for each production, the number of pre- and post-show discussions, as well as the extra sessions with stage professionals, the course needs to meet at least three days a week and requires energetic participation and stamina. Writing for the course includes preparing questions for discussion, and probably two short papers dealing with issues of text and performance, plus a final project. The pace of reading, viewing, and writing is fast, so previous experience with Shakespeare is useful but not required. Plays already booked in Stratford are: As You Like It, Hamlet, Titus Andronicus,and All's Well that Ends Well. Further information on the plays to be seen will be circulated as soon as it is available. Students must expect additional charges for tickets and transportation of $750.
Texts: Plays of the repertory in reliable editions (either a Complete Works or individual paperbacks, particularly from Arden, Oxford, New Cambridge, or New Penguin). A list of selected readings on Shakespeare in the theater, and the final list of productions, will be sent to students prior to the start of the session. Students should expect to read all plays ahead of time, and then again during the course.
7923 Global Shakespeare/A. Huang
Voodoo Macbeth? Heir apparent of the Denmark Corporation in Manhattan? A pair of star-crossed lovers from feuding families selling chicken rice in Singapore? A world-class and truly global author, Shakespeare continues to be the most frequently performed playwright. In the past century, stage, film, and television adaptations of Shakespeare have emerged on a wide range of platforms. The multilingual World Shakespeare Festival during the 2012 London Olympics brought global Shakespeares home to the U.K., and beyond the Anglophone world, his plays and motifs are present in the performance cultures of Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Asia/Pacific, Africa, Latin America, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, and far-flung corners of the globe. In fact, the history of global performance dates back to Shakespeare's lifetime. What is the secret of Shakespeare’s wide appeal? Has Shakespeare always been a cultural hero? How do directors around the world interpret such timeless tragedies as Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, The Tempest, Titus Andronicus, As You Like It, and Romeo and Juliet? This course examines the aesthetics and techniques of interpreting Shakespeare, with an emphasis on the conversations between Shakespeare's modern collaborators. Specifically, the course considers the tensions between claims for originality and poetic license, text and representation, and between interculturalism and nationalism. Special consideration is given to the cultural history of the Shakespearean corpus. The final list of plays and productions will be sent to students prior to the start of the session. (This course carries one unit of Group II credit and one unit of Group V credit. Students who have taken 7271 with Professor Huang should not sign up for this course.)
Texts: A reliable edition of the Complete Works (Arden, Oxford, Pelican, Riverside, New Cambridge); Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (Routledge); Alexander Huang, Chinese Shakespeares (Columbia). Optional: The Tempest app for iPad (http://luminarydigitalmedia.com/). We will also be using English-subtitled films in the open-access archive Global Shakespeares, ed. Alexander Huang and Peter Donaldson (http://globalshakespeares.org/), as well as other books, online resources, and videos that will be on reserve at Lincoln College.
Group III (British Literature since the Seventeenth Century)
7946 British Women’s Writing 1660–1830/C. Gerrard
The past 30 years has witnessed a quiet revolution in early modern literary studies. The canon has expanded rapidly to incorporate writing by women across all literary genres—poetry, drama, life-writing, the novel. Students now have access to a rich body of women’s writing across the period 1660–1830; yet there is still more to be uncovered and explored. This course will examine a wide range of primary texts by women writers and will draw on recent critical discussions to frame and conceptualize their concerns. We will also study some of the male-authored texts to which women writers responded. Students will be positively encouraged to pursue their own lines of original research, using online access to digitalized primary texts on ECCO (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online) and EEBO (Early English Books Online). The course will be arranged thematically, drawing together texts from across the entire period.
Texts: The key text to purchase in advance will be An Annotated Anthology of Eighteenth-Century Poetry, ed. David Fairer and Christine Gerrard (Blackwell). Copies of additional texts will be available at Bread Loaf. The full list of topics and readings is posted in the Oxford course section on Bread Loaf website. IMPORTANT: See the expanded list of readings for this course below:
The Rights and Wrongs of Women Texts: Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694-7), ed. Patricia Springby (Broadview Press, 2002); Sarah Fyge Egerton, ‘The Liberty’ and ‘The Emulation’; Mary Leapor, ‘Man the Monarch’; Anna Laetitia Barbauld, ‘The Rights of Women’ (Fairer and Gerrard); Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. M.iriam Brody (Penguin, 2004).
Women in Nature Texts: Anne Finch, ‘Upon the Hurricane’, ‘A Nocturnal Reverie’; Martha Fowke, ‘An Invitation to a Country Cottage’; Anna Laetitia Barbauld, ‘A Summer Evening’s Meditation’; Ann Yearsley, ‘Clifton Hill’; Anna Seward ‘To The Poppy’, in Fairer and Gerrard.
The Construction of Femininity Texts: Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1714); Thomas Parnell, An Elegy to an Old Beauty, Jonathan Swift, ‘A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed’; Anne Finch, ‘The Agreeable’; Martha Fowke, ‘Clio’s Picture’; Mary Leapor, ‘Mira’s Picture’ and ‘Dorinda at her Glass’; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ‘Satturday: The Smallpox’; Mary Jones, ‘After the Smallpox’, in Fairer and Gerrard.
Women and Marriage Texts: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ‘An Epistle from Mrs Yonge to her Husband’; ‘Written ex tempore on the Death of Mrs Bowes’; ‘The Lover’, in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Essays and Poems, ed. Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy (Oxford, 2001) ; ;Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (Penguin or World’s Classics edition). Mehitabel Wright, ‘An Address to her Husband’ in Roger Lonsdale (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology
Women and Domestic Labour Texts: Mary Collier, The Woman’s Labour; Mary Leapor, Crumble Hall; Anna Laetitia Barbauld, ‘Washing Day’. The first two in Fairer and Gerrard, the last can be accessed online.
Women and Enlightenment Texts: Susanna Centlivre, The Basset Table, ed. Jane Milling (Broadview Press, 2009); Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Turkish Embassy Letters (either Broadview ed. Hefferman and O’Quinn, or Penguin, ed. Anita Desai).
Women and Slavery Texts: Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (1688) (Penguin Classics); Hannah More, Slavery: A Poem (1787); Ann Yearsley, A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade (1788), available in Duncan Wu, Romanticism and also online at http://www.brycchancarey.com/slavery/poetry.htm
7950 Atlantic Crossings: Anglo-American Literary Relations, 1798–1900/C. Gerrard
This course aims to explore the cross-currents between British and American literary cultures of the nineteenth century. By looking at key texts across a wide variety of genres and modes, including romance, the gothic, realism, and naturalism, we will examine the sometimes tense and competitive relationship between American authors and British cultural models. We will explore a variety of themes such as American innocence and European "sophistication"; landscape and nature; history; self-reliance and community; sin, guilt and the "double self." We will conduct seminars around key pairings or groupings of pivotal British and American texts, supplemented by other contemporary materials. (This course carries one unit of Group III credit and one unit of Group IV credit.)
Texts: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Ryme of the Ancient Mariner (1798); Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851); William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1799) and "Westminster Bridge" (1802); Henry David Thoreau, Walden; Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself " from Leaves of Grass (1850), "As I ebb'd with the Ocean of Life," and "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818); Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly (1799); Edgar Allan Poe, Selected Tales (1837), especially "William Wilson" and "The Fall of the House of Usher"; Wordsworth, "The Thorn"; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter; George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860); Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905). Most of these texts are readily available in Oxford World’s Classics editions. There is an Easy Read or a Hackett edition of Edgar Huntly, ed. Philip Barnard.
7969 The Aesthetic Life: Art and Literature in the Nineteenth Century/S. Evangelista
When Oscar Wilde wrote that "All art is quite useless," he tried to provoke his contemporaries into seeing beyond didacticism and ethical concerns in art and literature. Wilde’s aphorism belongs within a wide-ranging debate on the meaning and value of art in the nineteenth century. This course explores the idea of the aesthetic life in Victorian Britain, from the birth of the Pre-Raphaelite movement to the decadence of the 1890s. We will study a mixture of literary texts and art objects, paying particular attention to the intersections, borrowings, and clashes of verbal and visual cultures in this period. How did the Victorians talk about, enjoy, and collect art? How did artists and writers push the horizons of expectation of their contemporaries? We will try to answer these questions by discussing issues that include Victorian museum culture, aestheticism, art for art’s sake, the supernatural, gender and sexuality, symbolism, and decadence. Apart from regular seminars, the course will comprise some museum visits in Oxford and London. Participants should budget around $100 for travel and tickets. Additional materials will be able available at Bread Loaf.
Texts: John Ruskin, Selected Writings (Oxford); Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (Oxford); A. S. Byatt, The Children’s Book (any edition); Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun (any edition); Henry James, Roderick Hudson (any edition); Vernon Lee, Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales (Broadview); Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray and essays "The Decay of Lying" and "The Critic as Artist" (any edition).
7975 James Joyce/J. Johnson
Students will engage in intensive study of Ulysses in its Hiberno-European, modernist, and Joycean contexts. We will begin by reading both Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (and Joyce's poetry, critical essays, Stephen Hero, Exiles, Giacomo Joyce, and Finnegans Wake will all be incorporated into discussions), but the course will be primarily devoted to the reading and study of Ulysses. This work's centrality to, yet deviation from, the aesthetic and political preoccupations of modernism will be explored.
Primary Texts: James Joyce, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses (preferably the H. W. Gabler ed.). Supplementary Texts: Stephen Hero, Exiles, Giacomo Joyce, Finnegans Wake, and Poems and Shorter Writings, ed. Richard Ellmann, A. Walton Litz, and John Whittier-Ferguson (Faber). (Students are not expected to buy the supplementary texts.)
7980 The Modern(ist) Novel/J. Johnson
T. S. Eliot, reviewing Ulysses, hesitated to describe the book as a "novel": "If it is not a novel, that is simply because the novel is a form which will no longer serve; it is because the novel, instead of being a form, was simply the expression of an age which had not sufficiently lost all form to feel the need of something stricter." Victorian society had itself a "form" and so could make use of that "loose baggy monster," the novel. Modernity, being itself formless, needed something more. Taking issue with Eliot’s diagnosis of the novel’s unfitness for modern purposes, the premise of this course will be that in the hands of the moderniststhe novel flourished. Ironically, the very unfitness of the Victorian novel for the expression of what Hardy called "the ache of modernism" stimulated the modernists to experiment, adapt, innovate. The result is one of the richest periods in the history of narrative fiction. We begin with Hardy’s "ache" and end with the "—" of which its author wrote, "I have an idea that I will invent a new name for my books to supplant 'novel.' A new — by Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy?"
Primary Texts: Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891; Norton Critical); Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891; Norton Critical); Henry James, The Ambassadors (1900; Norton Critical); Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (1907; any ed.); Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915; Norton Critical); James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (1916; Vintage); D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (1920; any ed.); Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927; any ed.). Everyone will be expected to read, independently, at least two other novels from a longer list available in Oxford. Secondary Text: The Narrative Reader, ed. Martin McQuillan (Routledge).
Group IV(American Literature)
7950 Atlantic Crossings: Anglo-American Literary Relations, 1798–1900/C. Gerrard
See the description under Group III offerings. This course carries one unit of Group III credit and one unit of Group IV credit.
Group V(World Literature)
7923 Global Shakespeare/A. Huang
See the description under Group II offerings. This course carries one unit of Group II credit and one unit of Group V credit.
7992 The European Nineteenth-Century Novel: Journeys of the Mind/S. Evangelista
The novel is a genre that travels across literary conventions and national boundaries. In this course we will explore a number of nineteenth-century novels from various European countries, including Germany, France, Russia, and, of course, Britain. We will be asking both what brings all these very different texts together under the umbrella term "novel" and what makes each one of them resist a fixed generic definition. Many of the works we will be reading treat the themes of place, travel, dislocation, cultural exchange, modernity, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, love (legitimate and impossible), selfhood and identity—reflecting within their pages the larger intellectual concerns that gave the novel form its vital energy through the century. We will examine all these themes alongside questions of form and genre, by means of a journey that starts from the exotic landscape of the Caucasus and ends in the crepuscular atmospheres of the decadent cities described by Rodenbach and Thomas Mann. The knowledge of a foreign language is not required for this course: all texts will be read in English.
Texts:Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time (1839); J. W. Goethe, Elective Affinities (1774); George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876); LeoTolstoy, Anna Karenina (1873-38); Emile Zola, The Belly of Paris (1873); J. K. Huysmans, Against Nature (sometimes also translated as Against the Grain, 1884); Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890); Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881); Ouida, Moths (1884); Georges Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte (1892); Thomas Mann, Death in Venice (1912). All these texts are widely available and can be read in any edition for the purposes of this course. Penguin, Oxford World’s Classics, or other editions with a critical introduction and reference material are by far the best. Moths is best read in the Broadview paperback edition.