English 730X (Literature & History): Craft as Theory and Method
Course description
This class focuses on craft as a form of material making and as a way of encountering the world. Defined broadly in the Oxford English Dictionary as “a skilled method or means of doing something” (especially one involving “making things by hand”), in the early modern period in Europe “craft” encompassed a dizzying array of techniques that had not yet been differentiated from the fine arts or distinguished from technological forms. In this context, craft acted as a capacious way to describe processes of making and knowing the material world, including (as a small sample of an almost endless list) cooking, needlework, weaving, gardening, carpentry, perfumery, pottery, cosmetic arts, paper-making, printing, and bookbinding. Our class will take advantage of this capaciousness to consider multiple ways that craft’s methods of making and knowing intersect with literature between the 17th and 19th centuries. As we consider historical materials our inquiry will be guided by contemporary theorizations of craft, particularly those that consider craft as a method of queer, trans, and disabled worldmaking.
Across the semester we will consider the political stakes of how craft has been defined and deployed in different contexts and trace how craft has been involved in quotidian forms of worldmaking across these contexts. We will analyze textual accounts of craft practices (such as recipe books and descriptions of trades), discuss literary evocations of craft techniques (such as descriptions of embroidery and spinning), and consider the craft methods foundational to various literary genres (such as the materiality of bookmaking and the technical labour involved in staged drama). We will also explore ways of reading crafted objects as material texts.
While the precise shape of this class is still a work in progress, some key questions that guide my thinking (and that I hope we can explore over the course of the semester) are: how do craft processes negotiate, make, and remake systems of gender, sexuality, race, class, and disability? How do forms of craft labour and embodied expertise change amidst the intensification of capitalist and colonialist projects, and how do they both contribute to and resist these projects? How and why are some material knowledges translated into text, and what are the implications of those translations? And, how can considering craft contribute to understanding and remaking the material worlds we have inherited from the early modern period?
While our class will focus on texts from 1600-1850, my goal is for students to be able to draw on its theoretical and methodological approaches for their own considerations of the intersections between craft and literature beyond this context.
This class fulfils the pre-1700 requirement.
Student learning outcomes
In this class students will:
- learn a range of different theoretical approaches to craft (including work from queer theory, trans studies, and disability studies)
- consider the theoretical, methodological, and political implications of different intersections between craft and literature
- practice situating historical texts in their social and political contexts and analyzing these texts using close reading, theoretical analysis, and other relevant
methodologies - develop their skills in graduate-level research, writing, and oral communication
Tentative list of possible readings
Primary texts:
- Margaret Cavendish, Poems, and Fancies (1653)
- John Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform’d (1653)
- Robert Hooke, Micrographia (1665)
- Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises (1677-1684)
- Poetry by Aphra Behn
- Selected texts from the Seventeenth-Century English Recipe Books collection
- Jane Barker, A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1723)
- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
Secondary texts:
- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Making Things, Practicing Emptiness” (2012)
- Jeanne Vaccaro, “Feelings and Fractals: Wooly Ecologies of Transgender Matter” (2015)
- Wendy Wall, Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen (2016)
- Alison Kafer, “Crip Kin, Manifesting” (2019)
- Danielle Skeehan, The Fabric of Empire: Material and Literary Cultures of the Global Atlantic, 1650-1850 (2020)
- Whitney Trettien, Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork (2021)
- Caroline Wigginton, Indigenuity: Native Craftwork and the Art of American Literatures (2022)
- Colby Gordon, Glorious Bodies: Trans Theology and Renaissance Literature (2024)