ENL 5227 Fall 2018 Coldiron

The course will focus on the major Elizabethan canon---Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare---and on the major literary fad of early modernity: sonnet sequences. The sonnet, a subset of the epigram in Renaissance poetic theory, had at that time a considerably greater thematic, expressive, and even formal range than we now usually realize. (The usual misunderstanding is another effect of canon-formation; lyric is quite sensitive to editorial interventions and material textuality.) We’ll explore and historicize lyric's range: from topographical and chorographical sonnet-epigrams (the first poems Spenser published), to the strange, metatextual experiments of Watson’s Hekatompathia, to the sequences of the 1590s (glancing at the lesser-known: ever read the Zepheria?), to the ideologically implicated formal experiments such as centi, couplet-sonnets, coronas, acrostics, macaronics. Sonnets shared cultural and codicological space with other lyric kinds (epyllia, elegies, emblems, complaints) treating, for example, politics, love, sex, landscape, religion, or philosophy. Formal, generic, and technical topics will be treated with an eye to theory and pedagogy; you’ll never again fret when teaching a metrical crux. Course activities will include reading, brief lecture notes, longer seminar discussions, short ungraded technical exercises; graded annotated bibliography, graded term presentation suitable for a professional conference, and graded final exam with technical, interpretive, and theoretical components. Course work may also include, depending on what you need/want, ungraded elements such as explications de texte, digital/e-text work, trial poems, visits to Special Collections, work on oral presentation skills, etc. (you'll tell me what you want to strengthen, and we'll work on it).