350:523                                                                                               

Index # - 52873

Distribution Requirement:  A3, B

Tuesday – 9:50 a.m.  

MU 207

Michael McKeon

Pastoral and Pastoralism in Eighteenth Century Britain 

This is a course in what is perhaps the most ancient of poetic forms, pastoral. The aim of the course will be to come to terms with pastoral both as a remarkably flexible and durable poetic form and as “pastoralism,” an ultimately philosophical/ideological understanding of human experience.

Pastoral is grounded in a spatial or geographical antithesis between country and city, rural and urban that yields a familiar series of value-laden extensions: simplicity vs. sophistication, innocence vs. corruption (or experience), contemplation vs. action, contentment vs. ambition, private retirement vs. public activity, otium vs. negotium, peace vs. war, communal affilation vs. individual aggression (or industry), and so forth. At the most fundamental level, these antitheses are gathered up by and as the abstract opposition between nature and artifice (or simply art). By a familiar and resonant amplification pastoral is also about time and temporality: the past/future vs. the present, the timeless vs. the temporal, the golden age vs. the iron age, the eternal vs. the secular, the undeveloped vs. the overdeveloped, etc. But pastoral exists to oppose nature and art in such a way as to intimate also their interpenetration. This is the structural or presentational premise of pastoral, which is poetry written in praise of rural life from the detached perspective of urbanites who have left the country for the city. An artful impersonation of nature, pastoral deploys the sophisticated techniques of poetic culture to represent its absence. It is “about” both nature and the poetic technology by which nature is enclosed, hence it is the supreme poetic form of conventionality: not only because it presents itself as a critique of (social, political, poetic) convention, nor only because it (inevitably) elaborates this critique in conventional ways, but because, in seeking to be mindful of both these conditions at once it takes as its subject the problem of conventionality itself.  

We’ll begin with a brief introduction to the bucolic origins of pastoral in archaic Greece and the ancient Roman differentiation between pastoral and georgic; the Christian allegorization of pastoral in the Middle Ages; and the social allegorization of pastoral in the Renaissance. Our study of pastoral in the late seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries will be guided by the broad hypothesis that the work of this period was to parody, reform, materialize, and domesticate the pastoral tradition. Although our major reading will be of poetry and prose theory, we also will encounter pastoralism in the novel and the essay. Our authors will include most or all of the following: Theocritus, Virgil, Horace, Marvell, Dryden, Behn, Finch, Pope, Philips, Tickell, Addison, Steele, Mandeville, Gay, Swift, Montagu, Dyer, Thomson, Duck, Collier, Johnson, Leapor, Collins, Gray, Boswell, Walpole, Goldsmith, Smollett, Adam Smith, Crabbe, Wordsworth, Repton, Price, and Knight. We’ll also read criticism by Empson, Rostvig, Kermode, Poggioli, Congleton, Durling, Alpers, Williams, Fabricant, Barrell, Landry, and Low.