Image: fold-out engraving of a flea from Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665)
This class will survey Restoration and eighteenth-century literature with a special focus on the topics of objectification, personification, and personhood. As we read a wide range of literature from this period we will consider who gets to count as a person in this historical moment; how personhood is constructed (and deconstructed) in text; and how the relationships between subject and object are contested and remade across different genres such as poetry, novels, scientific writing, autobiography, and children’s literature. Readings will include writing by Phillis Wheatley Peters, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Robert Hooke, William Hay, Olaudah Equiano, Jonathan Swift, and Eliza Haywood.
Assignments will include reading responses, an annotation assignment, an analysis of a scholarly article, a creative assignment, an essay, and a final portfolio.
All readings will be available for free online or via Laulima.