Renaissance Languages
Rebecca Bushnell profile
T 12-3
This course will explore what a "language" means now in literary/cultural criticism and what it meant in the early modern period; we will then proceed to investigate the characteristics of several cultural and political "languages" circulating in early modern England and Europe. We will begin by exploring the notion of cultural or political language/discourse, as it has been approached differently by Bakhtin, Foucault, and the Cambridge intellectual historians, and we will compare these ideas with key early modern discussions of language (including the arguments about the vernacular vs. the classical languages and the role of jargon). We will then focus on the case studies of: 1) the language of early modern poetics, (looking at James VI of Scotland's "Reulis", DuBellay's DEFFENSE, Philip Sidney's DEFENCE OF POESY and Puttenham's ART OF ENGLISH POESIE; 2) the language of education (as articulated in Erasmus' treatise "On the Education of Children" and Roger Ascham's THE SCHOLEMASTER ; 3) the language of "nature" (in selections from gardening books and Bacon's ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING; 4) the language of the body (as found in medical treatises such as Thomas Vicary's ANATOMIE OF THE BODIE OF MAN and Helkiah Crooke's MICROCOSMOGRAPHIA, as well as in "abuse" tracts such as Philip Stubbes' THE ANATOMY OF ABUSES; and 5) the language of the family (as articulated in marriage tracts such as William Whately's A BRIDES BUSH and Edmund Tilney's BRIEF AND PLEASANT DISCOURSE OF DUTIES IN MARRIAGE). The course will end with some intensive reading of several literary texts (including Jonson's Bartholomew Fair and selected poems of Donne), in which we try to understand how such "languages" and notions of language work in literary texts.
updated 2006-10-05
