1:00P-2:15P  TR  (30) 3 cr

OPEN TO MAJORS ONLY.  DECLARED MINORS OBTAIN AUTHORIZATION FROM
BH402.

This course considers a range of English texts, literary and extra-literary, written during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  Beginning with Shakespeare's MACBETH in the context
of Jacobean England, we will end with Mary Wollstonecraft's VINDICATION OF THE
RIGHTS OF WOMEN in the context of the impact of the American and French Revolutions.
Along the way we'll read works by Donne, Milton, Swift, Aphra Behn, Pope, Dryden, Johnson
and other writers, well and less well-known, female and male.  We will pay special attention to
how the assumptions of the "age of reason" shifted literary focus away from a politics couched
largely in religious, philosophical and ethical terms onto concerns with manners, "civility" and
the nuances of "polite" social behavior. Against the high moral and political seriousness of
Milton we will pose the witty seriousness of Pope; against the erotic idealist poetry of Donne,
and against Behn's "concern" with women's lives and morals we'll pose Wollstonecraft's.
Against Pope's and Johnson's relation to tradition and "authority" we'll pose Thomas Paine's.  We
will explore from a number of critical and theoretical perspectives, a period of time that moved
from debates about Divine Providence and "fixed" human nature to debates about rational
scientific progress and the power of individual reason; that continued to debate over whether
women are "innately" inferior or are socially trained to be so.  We will look at how the notion of
"the literary" itself is produced as a cultural category during this time period; and we will study
the ways authors achieve aesthetic effects with specific social and historical contexts.

Requirements: There will be three short papers, a midterm and a final exam.  Attendance and
participation in discussion is mandatory, and will count for a portion of the course grade.