"If new criticism focused on language without history, then new historicism has focused on history without language." As a result, in the past decade or so, philological questions have returned with new intensity and purpose in the study of early modern English literature. This course is designed to take us back to earlier critical concerns with the technical aspects of linguistic study in the period, so that we will be looking at dictionaries, rhetorics, and grammars, and poetic tracts from the period (Cawdrey, Erasmus, Puttenham, Hoskyns). At the same, it will sustain more recent focus on both the historical and material specificity of these forms of systematization by following the lead of some important recent work in the field (Williams, Parker, Fineman, Masten). The seminar has been organized by topics that are meant to foreground concerns peculiar to the period, often by working them against the grain of contemporary theory. Thus our reading of theoretical works from the late sixteenth-century (all of Puttenham, Sidney, and Hoskyns) will be pitted against works from this century (bits of Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Heidegger). In each seminar, we will be bringing the skills and issues derived from these readings to bear on texts both high (Shakespeare's Sonnets and Hamlet, Ben Jonson's Epigrams, Spenser's Faerie Queene (Book I), Sidney's Defense of Poetry) and low (Harrington's A New Discourse on a Stale Subject called the Metamorphosis of AIAX and a few randomly selected pamphlets and broadsheets).

Tentative list of the weekly topics:

Historical semantics 
On homonyms 
Copia or the generation of rhetorical surplus
Regulating the language:  lexical and grammatical standardization
Rhetorical figures:  prosopeia, chiasmus, hendiades, catachresis, paradox
Sententiae and commonplaces
Energia: the curse, oath, prayer, and praise
Proper names and signatures
Archaism, etymology, and neologism
Language and gender, race, class 
On the origin and dispersal of  language:  Adamic Language, Babel,
multiple languages and 	translation
The Word, the Eucharist, and magic
Poesis vs. 'techne' 

Requirements include bi-weekly exercises and a final term paper.