English 250, section 3: Textual Communities and the Modern
Instructor: Professor Joanna Picciotto
We’ll explore collectives made possible by the early modern communications revolution, focusing on print and the rise of periodical and serial forms. Case studies will include the Levellers, the Royal Society, and the Methodists, along with responses to these groups, from the famous (Andrew Marvell, Henry Fielding) to the anonymous. Secondary readings will be drawn from theoretical literature on modernity (in relation to media, secularization, and state-formation) as well as relevant criticism.
French 240A: The French Revolution
Instructor: Professor Susan Maslan
The seminar will offer students a foundation for understanding the extraordinary complexity of the Revolution itself. After getting up to speed quickly, we will devote most of our time to work on primary documents, works, and artefacts of the Revolution. The Revolution spurred and was shaped by the explosion of journalism—literally hundreds of newspapers sprang to life to life nearly immediately. We will read revolutionary journalists from the obscure to the famous (Camille Desmoulins), to the infamous (Marat). The Revolution also inaugurated a new era of oratory; we will read major speeches given in the National Assembly by Robespierre, Siéyès, Condorcet, and more. We will study some famous and some not so famous parliamentary debates. We will study the politics of the street: marches, riots, and political posters (many of which are available for study in the Bancroft Rare Books library). We will study the Haitian Revolution, the world’s first successful slave revolution, and the relation between it and the French Revolution.
We will study the French Revolution’s re-invention of time and space: i.e. the invention of the Revolutionary calendar and of the metric system. We will ask some fundamental questions: do books make Revolutions? That is, what relationships can we establish between Enlightenment writing (especially that of Rousseau) and Revolution? Conversely, we will ask whether Revolutions can create art: we will study revolutionary theater (which, like the press, grew exponentially), study the great painter and revolutionary Jacques-Louis David; ask ourselves about the meaning and significance of minor literature and popular culture in shaping the Revolution; and seek to understand how the lines between art and propaganda are drawn.
Comparative Literature 215: Literature and Letters in the Renaissance
Instructor: Professors Timothy Hampton and Vicky Kahn
Did the Renaissance have a conception of "literature"? In this seminar we will study the genesis of modern secular literary culture during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Our focus will be on the changing relationship between imaginative or "fictional" writing and the discourses that border the "literary" and help shape its emerging position center of the public sphere. Beginning with debates about the status of "poetry" at the end of the Middle Ages, we will focus on a series of major literary texts that raise questions about the status of the literary, both in its different socio-political settings (city state, court, Church) and in its relationship to other forms of writing (legal fictions, travel writing, political philosophy, religious polemic) that use fiction and discuss the imagination.