350:616

Index # - 72875

Distribution Requirement:  A2

Tuesday – 9:50 a.m.

MU 207

Jacqueline Miller

Seminar:  Spenser and Renaissance Culture

Spenser has been called the most marginalized major author in the English canon: a description that responds not only to his frequent omission from the standard undergraduate Chaucer-Shakespeare-Milton curricular triad, but also to his status in Elizabethan England as a non-aristocratic public servant stationed in Ireland for most of his career.  And yet he wrote for England its great national epic; he positioned himself as Chaucer’s heir; Milton professed himself Spenser’s pupil; and he has been recently described as a writer “central to the formation of early modern Europe.”  “Oh peerlesse poetry…where is then thy place?” Spenser asked in his first independent publication, and this is a question—endlessly debated in the Renaissance—to which he returned throughout his career, and one that continues to be at stake for his modern readers.

We'll read as much of Spenser as we can in this course--including his pastoral (The Shepheardes Calender), his sonnet sequence (Amoretti), his prose treatise (View of the Present State of Ireland), but with particular focus (approx. 7 weeks) on The Faerie Queene.  We'll consider, among other things: Spenser's complex representations of power and gender, and of ethics and politics, during the reign of Elizabeth; his de/constructions of national identity; his probing of the very possibility of writing poetry in the last half of the sixteenth century; his exploitation of print medium even as he addressed a coterie audience; the relation between his career as a civil servant and bureaucrat in the colonial government in Ireland and his announced laureate ambitions to reform English poetry and fashion himself as the English Virgil.  We’ll discover why his works have been the site for some of the best and most innovative writing about the Renaissance by several recent generations of scholars and critics.  We'll contextualize his works by reading from some of the major documents of Renaissance literary criticism (Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie; Sidney's Defense of Poetry); from courtesy books (e.g., Castiglione); the speeches of Queen Elizabeth; Renaissance debates about the nature of women; the contested status of epic vs. romance; theories (and practice) of allegory and of pastoral; and others.  This course will thus provide, through the lens of Spenser, an overview of some of the major issues of early modern (and especially Elizabethan) literature and culture.  Students so inclined will also have the opportunity to consider Spenser in relation to his major English successors and predecessors (Chaucer was Spenser’s “well of English undefiled”; Spenser was Milton’s “sage and serious poet” and Yeats’ “poet of the delighted senses”; Woolf advised readers to “make a dash for The Faery Queen and give yourself up to it”).  Throughout, however, our central concern will be an intensive study of the multifaceted texture of Spenser’s verse, the shape of his career, and his place in the rich and complex terrain of Renaissance culture.

Prior familiarity with Spenser is not a requirement for this seminar, nor is primary specialization in the Renaissance.  The structure of the course will allow each student's critical and theoretical predilections to shape the nature of his or her contributions (oral and written) to this class.  Coursework will include a substantial end-of-term paper, plus an oral presentation and/or short paper during the semester.