English 205: Writers of the British Isles |
This course introduces you to writers of English literature from the 8th to the 18th centuries. A millenium is quite a distance to cross. Some of these works may sound to you as though they're coming from very far away. When you get to know them, though, you are unlikely to forget them.
English 205 clusters works of literature that define, in their themes and styles, clear outlines of shared human response to the happenstance of history and the winding ways of culture. From a Norse saga told in the idiom of early Christian clerics, to fierce social satires launched in the dawn of our capitalist era, we watch reflections and even origins of our modern experience emerge into strangely familiar light.
The first cluster of literary works we will study come from the "Middle Ages" in England. This general category encompasses the Anglo-Saxon kingdom formed from the turbulent invasions of Norse people described in Beowulf, the Norman kingdom established by another Norse invasion of England by way of western France, the Plantagenet dynasty under which England slowly came into being as a nation, and terrible intermittent periods of civil chaos and warfare climaxing in the long suicidal feud between the royal houses of Lancaster and York. During this time, English writers struggled to make sense of a harsh, plague-ridden, famine-haunted, war-torn, and oppressive social world ruled by violent aristocrats and the Catholic Church.
We will follow thematic threads through selections from two masterpieces: the late Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf and the Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur. In these works, the fundamental bonds of society, religion, family, and marriage are tested and retested as alternatives to chaos. These works require very close reading. They trace the evolution of English as a language born from a shotgun wedding of German and French. They also bear the constant weight of human experience which is hard-won even when it is joyful and bright.
The second cluster of literary works comes from a period often known as the English Renaissance, which began somewhere in the mid 16th century and concluded in the early 17th century. During this period, the powerful Tudor dynasty ruled over an age of political centralization, religious turmoil caused by Protestants and Catholics fighting violently for the soul of the nation, a revival of classic literature that shaped the work of writers and thinkers, and a highly mobile social world allowing writers like William Shakespeare to bridge many aspects of English experience.
Our focus will fall on the attempts of two authors to cope with the challenges and dangers of Britain's early modern period. Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder and William Shakespeare are interesting to study together because their experience crossed into some of the same territory—the Tudor court and its reach into the provinces—but differ in equally fascinating ways. In the work of the two authors, we will study responses to the seductive political treachery of Tudor politics which present the English countryside and English country traditions as idealized escape or relief. Wyatt was an aristocratic courtier with an established country estate in England, and Shakespeare was a lower-middle class rural Englishman who came to London to raise his rural family's financial and social status. Between them, the reality of modern politics and human desire for spiritual redemption through nature emerges in a shape familiar to many in today's world.
The third literary cluster we will study traces the outlines of what was to become the modern Anglo-American world. The modern world of stocks and bonds began in 1692, with the establishment of the Bank of England. Religious tolerance in much of today's Western world began after the fierce sectarian turbulence marked by the execution of Charles I, the English Civil War, the Commonwealth, the Restoration of Charles II, and the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688.
One consequence of the vast change going on in England during this time was an obsession with rhetoric and abstract reason. This obsession was the perfectly natural result of vitriolic ideological disputes that frequently resulted in warfare, incarceration, torture, loss of property, exile, and oppression of conquered neighbors of England, especially Ireland.
The works we study in the third cluster will focus on issues of language and reason in civil society.
Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan, offers a famously pessimistic but deeply influential thesis: human beings, according to Hobbes, are inherently vicious and selfish, and the only way they can live a good life is to create "laws of nature" by which they mutually invest power in a government that must be obeyed.
The first two books of John Milton's Paradise Lost portrays the fallen Satan and his demonic minions as political outcasts thrown out of God's court, who in a variety of familiar rhetorical styles argue about how they will gain "restoration" to Heaven.
Despite the end of outright civil war following the Restoration of Charles II and the ensuing "Glorious Revolution," ideological tensions became more, not less, polarized. Many of the winners in the 1688 "Glorious Revolution" believed that its resolution was rational in its essence and that the principles of its proponents' thought could be crystallized in a rational manner.
Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal ferociously attacks the English attitude toward Ireland after its subjugation under William's forces. This infamous English domination of Ireland included oppression of the Roman Catholic majority by England's Protestant religious and political system. Swift dissects the logic of the English oppressors by assuming the voice of a narrator putting forward a hideous "modest proposal" for alleviating Ireland's dismal situation. In the process, Swift continues a lifelong attack on the excesses of contemporary rationalism.