| Theme Courses | Theme Events | Theme Links |
The EMC theme for 2004-2005, “Memory,” will explore such concepts as cultural and individual memory, acts of memorializing, forgetting, the sense of a past (and future), adaptations, and archiving (including archiving technologies). Whether individuals employ memory as a means of accessing information, or cultures use collective memory to commemorate historical events and people, memory also shapes the present and the future as it colors the lens through which new experiences are viewed.
What is not memorialized is often as important as what is, and courses offered this year will explore the relationship between memory and forgetting, adaptations of memory, and means of accessing memories via different forms of cultural artifacts. Especially germane to this is the Early Modern Center’s Online English Ballad Archive Project. Slated to digitize all extant ballads from 1500-1800, current work is focused on mounting the Pepys Ballads online and making them widely available for the first time ever.
Several early modern graduate and undergraduate courses will participate in the Memory theme this year in the English Department and affiliated departments. There will also be a Fall colloquium on the topic, a graduate student organized conference, Memory 1500-1800, and a Spring undergraduate conference (featuring students from participating courses throughout the academic year).
Memory Courses
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ENGL 10EM: Introduction to Literary Study: Early Modern (Undergraduate) The purpose of English 10, or Introduction to Literary Study, is to familiarize you with the tools of literary interpretation, including the techniques and vocabulary of analytic discussion and critical writing, and to help you develop close reading skills. While cultivating these techniques, the class will focus on poetry, drama, and prose fiction. The theme of this particular course is Memory; we will focus on the many implications and meanings of memory and its relationship to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries. We will examine mainly canonical texts and consider the differences between remembering people, remembering places, and remembering texts. How can a writer "remember" other writers' works? Why is the concept of memory so important to us? In addition to exploring these works in their historical contexts, we will also examine issues of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Texts will include Austen's Northanger Abbey, Behn's The Rover, the Bedford Glossary of Literary Terms, and a course reader. |
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ENGL 10EM: Introduction to Literature - Memory and Early Modern Studies (Undergraduate) The purpose of English 10, or Introduction to Literary Study, is to familiarize you with the tools of literary interpretation, including the techniques and vocabulary of analytic discussion and critical writing, and to help you develop close reading skills. While cultivating these techniques, the class will focus equally on poetry, drama, and prose fiction. The theme of this particular course is Memory; we will focus on the many implications and meanings of memory and its relationship to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We will examine mainly canonical, or classical, texts from the Renaissance and Neoclassical periods, and look forward to the Romantic period: as we do so, we'll consider the differences between remembering people, remembering places, and remembering texts. How can a writer "remember" other writers' works? Why is the concept of memory so important to us? In addition to exploring these works in their historical contexts, we will also examine issues of gender, sexuality, race, empire, and class. Texts will include Austen's Northanger Abbey, Behn's The Rover, the Bedford Glossary of Literary Terms, and a course reader. This course is recommended for students interested in doing a future Early Modern specialization. English 10 is required for all English majors and recommended for English minors. This course satisfies the last half of the GE Area A requirement. |
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ENG 197: English Broadside Ballads, 1500-1800 (Undergraduate) We will study the culture of the most published and most read of literary forms in early modern England: the broadside ballad. In the first half of the course, we will situate ballads within their historical, political, social, and aesthetic contexts. We will read a sampling of ballads of the period together with critical works about them, and consider the kinds of persons who wrote and published ballads, as well as the nature of ballad music (tunes and refrains), formal features of the ballads (woodblock images, blackletter print, meter), practices of circulation, and some recurrent themes popular in the period. In the second half of the course, we shall enter workshop mode, focusing on reading, analyzing, and mounting online annotated transcriptions of some of the 1,775 ballads in the important Samuel Pepys collection. As part of this “hands on” approach, excursions to the UCSB library and to the Huntington library will be offered. The workshop part of the course will involve students in the Early Modern Center’s ongoing enterprise to create an unprecedented English Ballad Archive, 1500-1800, beginning with the ballads collected by Pepys. Assignments: Two oral and written reports on a facet of ballad culture generally and on a ballad theme in the Pepys collection (6-10 minutes; 2-3 pages each) as well as online annotated transcriptions of two Pepys ballads. |
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ENGL 231: English Broadside Ballads 1500-1800 (Graduate) We will study the culture of the most published and most read of literary forms in early modern England: the broadside ballad. In the first half of the course, we will situate ballads within their historical, political, social, and aesthetic contexts. We will read a sampling of ballads of the period together with critical works about them, and consider the kinds of persons who wrote and published ballads, as well as the nature of ballad music (tunes and refrains), formal features of the ballads (woodblock images, blackletter print, meter), practices of circulation, and some recurrent themes popular in the period. In the second half of the course, we shall enter workshop mode, focusing on reading, analyzing, and mounting online annotated transcriptions of some of the 1,775 ballads in the important Samuel Pepys collection. As part of this “hands on” approach, excursions to the UCSB library and to the Huntington library will be offered. The workshop part of the course will involve students in the Early Modern Center’s ongoing enterprise to create an unprecedented English Ballad Archive, 1500-1800, beginning with the ballads collected by Pepys. Assignments: Two oral and written reports on a facet of ballad culture generally and on a ballad theme in the Pepys collection (6-10 minutes; 2-3 pages each) as well as online annotated transcriptions of two Pepys ballads. |
Memory Events
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Laurie Shannon Lecture on "Acteon's Coat" Friday, April 22nd at 2:00 pm., English Dept. Seminar Room, SH 2635 Laurie Shannon is Associate Professor of English at Duke University, where she specializes in English Renaissance thought and writing. She is the author of Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts, and is a graduate of Harvard Law School who uses her legal training as one of her tools in the analysis of Elizabethean life. Her talk will address the philosophical place of animals as the underwriters of "Man" in the early modern milieu, when Elizabetheans made surprisingly ambiguous attempts to distinquish humans from animals. |
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Everett Zimmerman Seminar with John Barrell John Barrell from The University of York will be presenting a lecture entitled "Cottage Politics" at the first annual Everett Zimmerman seminar. His talk will look at the art of the picturesque, at caricatures, and at various kinds of popular prints, as well as at literary texts in Britain in the 1790s; and it will ask what happened to the idea of the cottage as an idealised place of retirement and privacy when the cottage started being used as an image in anti-revolutionary propaganda. The event will be preceded by a lunch in the EMC. The talk will be held in SH 2635 at 3 pm. |
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Winter Conference The program will include ten panelists representing a variety of disciplines, as well as talks by the following invited speakers: · Marvin Carlson, Professor of Theater and Comparative Literature at the City University of New York · Carolyn Lougee Chappell, Professor of History at Stanford University · Richard Helgerson, Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara For more information, please visit the conference website. |
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Daniel Woolf "From 'hystories' to the historical: Key Transitions in Thinking about the Past, 1500-1700". Professor Daniel Woolf is in the Department of History and Classics and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta, Canada. The event will be held in the English Department Seminar Room (SH 2635). |
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Fall Colloquium Friday, November 5th, 1-5 pm, in the English Department seminar room (SH 2635) Peter Stallybrass (Penn), "Technologies of Memory and Erasure in Hamlet" After seeing the Ghost, Hamlet says: Remember thee? The questions I will be asking are: what kinds of writing can one "wipe away"? On what kinds of surface are they written and with what kinds of instrument? How do the material conditions of writing and erasure shape both our images and practices of remembering and forgetting from Plato to Freud and Derrida? Jayne Lewis (UC-Irvine), "'Pictures Laid in Fading Colours'": Locke, Radcliffe, and the Shifting Spectra of Memory The paper looks at the relationship between eighteenth-century constructs of the literary and Lockean memory, both of which are built around a culturally useful model of spectrality that is ultimately challenged via Radcliffe in late c-18 gothic fiction. The first part of the paper is a reading of Locke's proto-gothic description of memory (and, more accurately, of forgetting) in the Essay. I try to link that description to contemporary apparition narrative, whose unique symbolic and epistemological designs I believe Locke used to develop a fundamentally literary model of mind in its retentive mode . The second part of the paper briefly casts the history of the early novel as a perpetuation of that model, with gothic writing intervening in the latter part of the 18th century to exaggerate the complicity between the two. I've focused here on Radcliffe's enactment of a purely literary memory in her fictions, tracking the disproportionately large part played by conspicuously inaccurate memory and even amnesia. In linking literate experience with forgetting as opposed to recollection, Radcliffe undermines the Lockean model even though that model underpins her narrative and descriptive techniques. The third and final part of the paper identifies an emergent and alternative model of memory in Radcliffe's work, one drawn from contemporary watercolor aesthetics. This mode of memory begins, rather than ends, in obscurity, and is identified with transformation and desire as opposed to inscription and the transmission of a collectively available, culturally unifying past. I do not however use the word "sublime." |
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David Cressy Talk "Press Censorship and the Public Sphere in Revolutionary England." Friday, February 27th at 3:30 in South Hall 2635. Reception to follow. Professor Cressy is Professor of History at the Ohio State University, and he is spending the current academic year as the Fletcher Jones Distinguished Fellow at the Huntington Library. |