ENG 730X Literature and History: Libertinism
Instructor: Emily West (west2@hawaii.edu)
Time: Mondays, 6:00-8:30pm
Location: Sakamaki B211
Course description
Libertine, n. A person (typically a man) who is not restrained by morality, esp. with regard to sexual relations; a person of dissolute or promiscuous habits. (Oxford English Dictionary)
This class focuses on libertinism, a form of gendered performance, sexuality, political subjectivity, and philosophical thought that flourished in the English Restoration (1660-1688) and reverberated across the next century. Libertinism’s flagrant performances of nonconformity and erotic excess were organized around bodily pleasures and sought to transgress the boundaries of morality, legality, social order, and the human body itself. Libertine experiments in moving beyond these forms imagined ways of being that were by turns radical and reactionary, anti-authoritarian and autocratic, generative and destructive.
As we examine representations of libertinism in texts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we will consider different elements of this style and social movement. A primary focus of the class will be questions of gender and sexuality. We will consider how early modern systems of gender and sexuality operated (and how they were incorporated into or abjected from the modern systems that replaced them); how these systems intersect with and are powerfully shaped by those of race, class, and (dis)ability; how libertinism is linked to crises of masculine authority; how women and gender-nonconforming people enacted libertinism; and how contemporary trans, crip, and queer theories can illuminate these historical texts and contexts.
Another focus of our readings and discussions will be the political context and implications of libertine acts. We will examine how libertinism reflects the transition between absolutist and liberal systems of government; how it expresses the relationship between sexuality and the state; how it is embedded in England’s rapidly expanding national involvement in colonialism and transatlantic slavery; and how it is implicated in categories of criminality and vagrancy.
We will also think through libertinism’s intellectual grounds, with a focus on how theories of materialism (which expressed the belief that there is nothing beyond the physical world) offered dissident ways of understanding selfhood and social order.
Across the semester, we will therefore consider how the question of sexual freedom intersects with vital contexts of power, politics, and philosophy, and think through the afterlives and contemporary resonances of libertinism’s embodied experiments.
Student learning outcomes
After completing this course, you will be able to
- map, historicize, and contextualize libertinism as a literary and cultural movement
- situate 17th– and 18th-century texts in their social and political contexts and analyze these texts using close reading, theoretical analysis, and other relevant methodologies
- share your own research findings on and original critical analysis of some aspect of libertinism in written and oral forms
Readings may include (provisional list)
- Aphra Behn, poetry and The Luckey Chance
- Poetry by John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester
- Poetry by Margaret Cavendish
- Lucy Hutchinson and Thomas Creech, selections from translations of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura
- Delarivier Manley, The Royal Mischief
- William Wycherley, The Country Wife
- Eliza Haywood, The Masqueraders and Fantomina
- John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera
- Henry Fielding, The Female Husband
- Samuel Richardson, Pamela
Assignments may include
- weekly reading responses
- presentation and discussion questions
- final project proposal
- final project (conference-length research essay or alternative critical/creative project)
- class symposium on final projects