Sexuality, Festivity, and Animality in the English Renaissance

The course surveys early modern texts to ask what roles sex and sexuality and celebrations and festivities play in constructing the concept of the animal (human and non-human)? This course will explore the strategies that early modern texts (poems and plays, religious and scientific tracts, works of political philosophy and household management) used to represent, categorize, know, and speak of and for animals (human and non-human).

In this course, we will attend closely to primary texts. It is important to be able to speak about a text—ideas it might have and may indeed continue to express, how it is structured, its relation to other texts within its genre or form, its relation to historical events, its material history—with precision and concision. We will engage with texts through weekly seminar discussions, short presentations, writing, and critical readings.

Scholarly essays, articles, book chapters, and the occasional book will invite us to consider how the early modern texts continue to live within works of history, theory, literary criticism, and popular culture. More particularly, we will investigate how critical writings form objects of study, such as sex and sexuality or ritual celebrations and festivities, through their engagement with the early modern texts we are reading.

Course Goals

The goals for the course are for you to develop: * facility reading, interpreting, and analyzing early modern texts through a survey of Renaissance literature across multiple genres and disciplines. * knowledge of early modern debates about sex and sex acts, festivity and celebrations, and animals and their roles in constructing conceptions of the human. * the skills needed to read complex theoretical and critical essays, discern their key claims, assess their arguments, and position them in a larger scholarly dialogue. * critical self-awareness, especially of the usually tacit methods and presuppositions that guide the way you read, write, and talk about literature.