30030 - English Literature 1 (LM) (B)

Course contents

Interfacing Science and Literature: Literary Representations of Woman in English Literature within a Gender Perspective

 

The course will investigate in a gender perspective the re-shaping and re-fashioning of the self from the Age of discovery to the beginning of the 18th century. It will analyse the formation of identity with specific reference to the different representations of the woman as otherness (Amazon, virgin, witch, whore, warrior, savage and cannibal) in various literary genre (theatre, novel and travel literature). The course intends to re-read the construction of the woman as sexual otherness and women's stereotypes not only in the literary sources but also in scientific and medical debates which circulated in Europe during this period. In particular, it will focus on the representations of the body as a remote and strange terrain into which the language of colonialism and the language of science meshed with one another.

The Course intends to Enable the students to:

Re-read in a gender perspective the formation of English identity/identities.

See how the construction of otherness and race appears in many literary genres and in ‘low' and ‘high' culture.

Verify how from the early modern period well-known stereotypes concerning the body of the woman started to be reinforced through medical demonstrations and scientific notions.

Explain how the representation of difference and its institutionalisation are the product of complex politics on/of the body.

 

Readings/Bibliography

The lecturer will analyse examples from different primary sources such as Titus Andronicus, Anthony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline (William Shakespeare). She will also investigate some examples of English travel reports (Walter Ralegh, George Best, and Thomas Harriot), and will analyse Aphra Behn Oronooko, Margaret Cavendish The Blazing World, and Worthley Montagu Turkish Embassy Letters .

 

The final Syllabus and Reading List will be available on the first day of class according to the level and needs of the students :

 

Kim. F. Hall , Thinks of Darkness, Cornell, Cornell University Press, 1997 (some chapters)

Mary Floyf-Wilson , English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama, Cambridge University Press, 2003 (some Chapters)

Jonathan Sawday , The Body emblazoned , Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture , Routledge, London and New York, 1995.

Margo Hendrix and Patricia Parker (eds.) Women, Race and Writing in the Early Modern Period, London, New York, Routledge (some essays)

Ania Loomba , Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989). (selected chapters)

------------------ Shakespeare and Race, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002). (selected chapters)

Orgel Stephen, The Performance of gender in Shakespeare's England, Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 1996

Mrgaret T. Hodgen , Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1964, (1971) (selected chapters).

M. Fuller “Ralegh's Fugitive Gold: Reference and Deferral in the Discoverie of Guiana”, in S. Greenblatt ed. New World Encounters, (Barkeley Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 218-240.

L. Montrose , “The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery”, in S. Greenblatt, ed., New World Encounters, (Barkeley Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 177-217.

L. Montrose, The Subject of Elizabeth. Authority, Gender, and Representation , Chicago, The University Press of Chicago 2006 (alcuni capitoli)

Ayanna Thompson , “The Racial Body and Revenge: Titus Andronicus”, Textus, 2:XIII, (2000), pp. 325-346.

Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn , Renaissance Bodies. The Human Figure in English Culture 1540-1660, London, Reaktion, 1990 (selected chapters)

Jonathan  Gil Harris , Foreign Bodies and the Body Politc, Cambridge UP, 1998. (Alcuni capitoli)

Luke Wilson , “William's Prelectiones: “The Performance of the Body in the Renaissance Theater of Anatomy”, in Representation (special Issue) The Cultural Display of the Body, n. 17, 1997,.

Monticelli Rita, Lo stupore della differenza. Anna Jameson e la tradizione del racconto di viaggio , Bologna Patron, 2000 (alcuni capitloli)

Ascari Maurizio, Monticelli Rita, Fortunati Vita, (eds.),  “Introduction”, di Travel Writing and the Female Imaginary, Bologna Patron, 2001,

Ludmilla Kostova, “Constructing Oriental Interiors: The Eighteenth-Century Womarn Travellers and their Easts, in Ascari Maurizio, Monticelli Rita, Fortunati Vita, (eds.), Travel Writing and the Female Imaginary, Bologna Patron, 2001, pp. 17- 34

Devoney Looser, “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Historian of Her Own Time”, British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820, Chicago, Johns Hopkins UP, Baltimore, 2000, pp. 61-88

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Teaching methods

·          Lessons

·          Seminars

·          Class Discussion

Assessment methods

The requirements for the course include:

Active class participation 25%

One final exam: 75%

Office hours

See the website of Gilberta Golinelli