Professor: Ben Saunders
4 credits
The seventeenth-century in England was a period of extraordinary social upheaval and political violence. It was also a time of urgent intellectual inquiry. Religious radicals challenged the ancient authorities of crown and church in a Puritan revolution, and were challenged in turn by a monarchist backlash. Political structures, sexual mores, and philosophical paradigms shifted … and then shifted again. New and disturbing questions emerged. For example: If kings did not rule by divine right, what other forms of political authority might be imagined? If religious disputes could not be settled with certainty, what forms of certain knowledge might be found? Should we denigrate bodily desire as sinful, regard it neutrally as the manifestation of an amoral reproductive instinct, or elevate it to the peak of human experience? What was the ideal relation of the body to the mind, of the mind to the self, and of the self to others? And so on.
Modernity originates in the great intellectual crises of seventeenth-century European thought; to understand the period is therefore to understand where we “moderns” come from. In this course we will read several key writers who grappled with these questions, producing some of the most difficult—and daring—poetry in English literary history in the process. We will focus particularly on the issues of theology, sexuality, and self-knowledge as explored in their work.
Readings to include selections from Donne, Herbert, Marvell, Crashaw, Phillips, Hutchinson, Rochester and Behn—obsessed geniuses, all.