föstudagur, ágúst 30
Hmmm. Er naestum thvi buin ad akveda mig ad taka eftirfarandi bekki i haust:
Studies in Medieval Literature: The Apocalypse in Medieval Tradition A course in the uses and understandings of the Apocalypse in medieval tradition, beginning with biblical apocalypses and their related iconography and exegesis and then moving onto examples of apocalyptic modes and texts in medieval literature, including Hildegard of Bingen, Piers Plowman, and Pearl, among other texts. We will work towards defining “apocalypse” and “apocalyptic”—at least in terms of the medieval understanding; we will also make use of twentieth-century definitions (both scholarly and popular) and various theoretical approaches.
18th-century Literature: Manners and Morals Eighteenth - century writers used the concept of manners to secure a wide range of political and domestic virtues; the partial displacement of morals by manners in turn raised new questions about the relationship between language, politics, and power. As ethics devolves into etiquette, what is left for moral writing? To what extent does the literature of conduct replace political writing as the most convenient genre in which to develop moral and political arguments? How does the rising genre of the novel (we will read Richardson's Pamela, Burney's Evelina and Austen's Emma) both secure and undermine the dominance of manners? How do women writers gain jurisdiction over manners (and perhaps over morals as well)? The eighteenth-century authors we consider include Locke, Mandeville, Shaftesbury, Pope, Swift, Richardson, Fielding, Hume, Smith, Sheridan, Burney, Chesterfield, Burke, Wollstonecraft, Austen. Theoretical and critical readings by N. Elias, M. Foucault, P. Bourdieu, J.G.A. Pocock, N. Armstrong, G.J. Barker-Benfield, C. Kay, C. Johnson, L. Klein.
Advanced Topics in Feminist Theory: Studies in the Histories of Sexuality and Gender. Using the early modern period (1500 to 1800) for its materials, this seminar will explore the sex and gender systems of an historical period before modern sexual identities were invented and before gender difference was firmly anchored to the notion of male-female bodily difference. We will begin by reading Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex and then turn to a series of historical, critical, literary and visual materials through which we can explore such questions as: how is gender difference secured in a one-sex model of culture? how does humoral theory affect notions of gender difference in such a culture? how is gender difference constructed through particular forms of ideological interpellation, divisions of labor, and outward transformations of the body such as clothing, jewelry, cosmetics and hair styles? how do we speak about same-sex relations in a culture that did not think in terms of normative heterosexuality? was the early modern period a “golden age” for same-sex practices? what kinds of institutions regulated sexual practice in this culture? Critical readings will include selections from Paster’s The Body Embarrassed, Goldberg’s Sodometries, DiGangi’s The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama, Stallybrass and Jones’ Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, Traub’s The Renaissance of Lesbianism, and Mendelson and Crawford’s Women in Early Modern England. Primary materials will include Shakespeare’s sonnets, miniatures by Isaac Oliver, portraits by Van Dyke, Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure, and other artifacts that raise interesting questions about sex, gender difference, marriage, and same-sex communities in the early modern period.
The Critic in Culture The history and contemporary practice of the essay in cultural criticism, with particular attention to critical voice, essayistic form, the essayist's self-placement and positioning of the reader, and strategic re-readings of earlier essayists. After a consideration of the history of the cultural-critical essay, focusing on Arnold, Nietzsche, and Woolf, the course turns to postwar developments, as exemplified by Barthes, Foucault, Lentricchia, Cixious, Haraway, Menchú, Kermode, Kaplan, and others.
