English
ENGL-326-301
Topics In Drama to 1660: Introduction to Shakespeare
MW-3:30-5:00
Phyllis Rosalyn Rackin
BFS Sector III
Although Shakespeare’s plays are usually studied as high canonical literature, they were originally written as playscripts designed for the entertainment of a disorderly, socially heterogeneous crowd and the financial profit of the players. This course will attempt to resituate the plays in their original theatrical setting. We will study a representative selection of Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, and histories (to be chosen by the class at the first meeting) along with background material on Shakespeare’s theater and his culture. There will be one or two hour-exams, one or two short papers, and a final exam. In addition, students are expected to meet in study groups outside of class and to make thoughtful, well-informed contributions to the class listserver and discussions.
ENGL-329-401, Cross Listed with: COML-329-401/CLST-329-401
Topics in Classicism and Literature: Literature and Political Culture Among the Ancients
MW-2:00-3:30
Anne D. Hall
BFS Sector III
This course is the counterpart to “Poetry and Politics in Ancient Greece,” which Professor Hall has taught at Penn for several semesters. In this course we will concentrate on “the city” and will discuss works for which there was not time in the other course. As Plato’s Republic was the heart of the other course, the heart of this one is Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics and the Politics, although it is good to remember that the composer Berlioz thought the most important influence on him was Virgil’s Aeneid.
Modern artists hold that literature inhabits a realm unto itself for the sake of imaginative exploration of private visions. Classical writers held that literature is an imitation of humanity, how humanity is and how humanity might be. Therefore, classical art is closely connected to political culture. Literature has a music that shapes the soul, and how souls are shaped is crucial to the goals of the city.
In this course we will read great authors who thought long and deeply about the relationships among arts, politics, and ethics. In the course of our discussions, we will be touching on questions central to a liberal education: what is the definition of a human being? What is his role as a citizen? Wherein does happiness lie? What is the connection between individual happiness and the success of a city?
Reading: Gilgamesh, Sophocles’ Oedipus trilogy (Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone—and also Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy) Herodotus’ History of the Persian Wars, several dialogues of Plato (Euthyphro, Ion, Symposium, Lysis, Laches, Phaedo), Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics, parts of Livy’s History of the Roman Republic, and Virgil’s Aeneid.
ENGL-341-401, Cross Listed with: GSOC-341-401
Topics In 18th-Century Literature: The Pamela Craze
TR-10:30-12:00
Toni Bowers
BFS Sector III
In 1740, a successful London printer named Samuel Richardson published what turned out to be one of the most influential and controversial novels ever written, Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded. It tells the story of a servant girl who repeatedly resists the sexual overtures of her powerful “master,” Mr. B., and of the supposedly happy ending – marriage to a wealthy man – that her virtuous behavior eventually earns.
The questions about power, class, gender, virtue, and meaning that Pamela made visible sparked an enormous amount of writing in its day and ever since. Was Pamela really virtuous, or did she manipulate Mr. B’s desire for her in order to gain wealth and social position? Who is the agent of the seduction in Pamela, and who its object? What is the nature of Pamela’s “virtue,” and what is the quality of her “reward?” Is women’s virtue different from men’s? Is marriage necessarily a form of economic exchange, even of prostitution for women? These are some of the questions that Pamela raised for readers of the eighteenth century, and that continue to this day to be debated in writing surrounding this controversial work.
In this advanced seminar, we will examine the universe of writings that have emerged since 1740 in response to Pamela, with emphasis on works by Richardson’s contemporaries in the mid-eighteenth century. Starting with the novel itself and with Richardson’s defenses of it, we’ll look at the multitude of “anti-Pamelas” that crowded 18th-century publication lists, and at voices that have sounded since in the debate, either to praise or to attack the novel. Emphasis will be placed on independent library research and on the recovery and interpretation of eighteenth-century texts. Students will learn to use sophisticated research tools — electronic databases, microfilm collections, and rare book libraries, for example – efficiently and critically. Class meets on the 6th floor of Van Pelt Library. Students from disciplines other than English are welcome.
ENGL-363-301
Topics In 20th-Century American Literature: American Prison Writing
TR-1:30-3:00
Amy B Kaplan
BFS Sector III
The prison looms today as a central feature of American society. With more than two million people crammed into the nation’s overcrowded jails and prisons and an increasing number of people in its detention centers abroad, the United States has become known around the world as a leader in imprisonment. As incarceration has become ever more central to American society, literature by prisoners, ex-prisoners and writers fascinated with life behind the walls has become ever more vital to understanding prison’s wider social, historical and imaginative significance.
Within its imagined walls, the prison contains a bewildering array of associations: a place of isolation and illness, correction and corruption, tedium and torture, violence and tenderness, protest and political organizing. How do writers represent freedom in relation to captivity, the body in relation to abuse, race in relation to the overwhelming numbers of non-whites imprisoned? How do they reflect on the significance of citizenship in relation to disfranchisement, and on the meaning of life in relation to legalized killing? How do they connect an often invisible population inside those walls to society on the outside? How do writers narrate personal journeys, both literal and figurative, across prison walls? And how does writing, in some cases, offer a kind of liberation?
While most of the literature in this course was written in the 20th century, we will start with materials on the origin of the penitentiary in the slave plantation and 19th century reform movements. Focusing on American literature, we will also read literature by authors from other countries and will end the course with material about the exportation of the prison system to Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Reading includes fiction, poems, and memoirs by John Edgar Wideman, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Franz Kafka, Alexander Berkman, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, George Jackson, Etheridge Knight, Malcolm Braly, Carolyn Baxter, Patricia McConnell, Jack Abbot, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Ha Jinn, and theory by Erving Goffman, Michel Foucault, and Angela Davis. We will also view some films and visit The Eastern State Penitentiary.