ENG431/001:
Studies in 16th and 17th-Century Literature:
Land, Seas, Property and Sovereignty in Early Modernity
Instructor: Dr. Derrick Higginbotham
Time: Mondays and Wednesdays, 10.30 – 11.45am
Location: 309 KUY
Email: deh2@hawaii.edu
Office Hours: By appointment
Course Description:
We use metaphors linked to water all the time: we might speak of difficult times as ‘rough seas’ or describe one’s a situation or identity as ‘fluid’. In this class, we will reflect on the meaning of water as it appears in a variety of literary texts from Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as well as into the future.
We, for instance, will read Hugo Grotius’ short, 1609 legal treatise, The Free Seas, a document that sets the groundwork for our legal notions of the sea as a ‘property’ that can be controlled or owned, and thus about sovereignty. Who controls the oceans/seas/water? We also will look at representations of pirates and fishermen in Shakespeare’s play, Pericles, to think about what ocean as a space means. By looking at John Lyly’s drama Gallatea and Christopher Marlowe’s short poem, “Hero and Leander,” we also will think about how the fluidity of the seas/water becomes a way to think about the fluidity of gender and sexuality, indicating that such early texts anticipate our thinking about gender fluidity and queer sexualities.
From another angle, we will read poetry by John Donne, Hester Pulter, and Andrew Marvell to think about early colonialism and the seas. How do notions of sexuality, gender, race, and class transform and sometimes undergo reformation in different environmental contexts, especially oceanic spaces? We will think critically about the ways that these texts and ideas might help us to reframe our engagements with the environment today, both in terms of sea and land.
We also will engage with selected essays by thinkers in ecocritism, Black studies, Indigenous studies, as well as queer and trans theories, including the work of Jennifer L. Morgan, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Keith Pluymers, Renisa Mawani, and Mel Y. Chen, who will help us historicize and theorize these issues. In the end, we will think critically about the ways that these texts and ideas might help us to reframe our engagements with the environment today.
Book List:
Grotius, Hugo, The Free Sea, translated and edited by David Armitage. Liberty Fund, 2004.
Selections from Hester Pulter’s poetry (1640s and 50s) [Online edition]
Selected Andrew Marvell’s poem “Bermudas” (1681) (PDF Handout)
John Donne’s poems “The Calm” and “The Storm” (1604) (PDF Handout)
Christopher Marlowe, “Hero and Leander” (1598) (PDF Handout)
Shakespeare’s Pericles, Suzanne Gossett, ed. Arden edition. London: Bloomsbury, 2004.
John Lyly’s Galatea. Leah Scragg, ed. Manchester University Press, 2012.
Gerrard Winstanley’s pamphlets, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (1649) and The True Levellers Standard (1649) [PDF Handout]
Student Learning Outcomes:
In this course, students will:
- Practice reading literary texts critically and appreciate how genre shapes content
- Grasp key ideas in ecocriticism, especially as they apply to the interpretation of literature and historical texts
- Gain an understanding of literature’s potential and limits as a source for cultural histories
- Strengthen their historical understanding of the early modern period by attending to how this era conceptualized land and water
- Recognize the ways that earlier literary and historical eras continue to influence the literature and culture of the present
- Fortify their skills in presenting ideas orally
- Improve their skills in incorporating and documenting secondary scholarship when crafting an argumentative essay
Methods of Assessment:
10% Class Participation
25% Poetry Paper (800 words)
20% Response Paper (700 words)
10% Blog Responses (5 x 50 words at a minimum)
35% Final Paper (1500 words)