Lectures on and discussion of Dryden, Swift, Pope, and some of their contemporaries.

In this course we shall read a variety of texts that sought to represent strange new worlds—or invited readers to see their own world as strange—from Royal Society publications describing microscopic worlds to popular voyage accounts regaling readers with remote worlds, to prose fiction and poems that wrote familiar worlds anew. As we read the works of philosophers, scientists, mariners, poets, journal writers, journalists, dramatists, and fiction writers we will attend to their struggle to find a language to convey these strange and estranged worlds, as they popularize new scientific discoveries, debate approaches to life in a globalizing market society, or satirize new commercial regimes as well as the promised gains of scientific observation. We shall also ask how and why so many works figured the object of knowledge and the instabilities and limits of language as female. As we interpret representations of coffee house conversationalists, hack writers, masquerading women, naïve travellers, criminal gangs, among others, we shall be especially interested in the development of new techniques of realist writing and the complexities of the satire of this period. This class satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills