Studies in 16th-Century Literature (431-0-20)
Topic
Spenser and Race
Instructors
Kathryn Sydney Evans
Meeting Info
University Hall 418: Mon 2:00PM - 4:50PM
Overview of class
Spenserians have often identified their scholarship more closely with medieval studies than with early modern—understandably, given Spenser's deliberate archaism and his particular debts to Chaucer. The International Spenser Society, for instance, hosts its annual open-submission Spenser panels not at the Renaissance Society of America conference but the Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo. Accordingly, it has been only in recent years—as medieval scholars have worked to counter right-wing appropriations of medieval symbols and demonstrably false claims about the past—that Spenserians have been forced to reckon with race in ways that go beyond Spenser's direct implication in Irish colonialism. In this course, we will read Spenserian texts--including approximately half of The Faerie Queene and A Viewe of the Present State of Ireland—paying particular attention to Spenser's religious extremism; his deployment of medieval racial tropes (such as the "Saracen"); and his advocacy of the brutal English colonial project in Ireland. We will also devote ourselves to a critical interrogation of Spenserian criticism—including the longstanding conversation about Spenser's anti-Irish ideology and politics, the 2021 special issue of Spenser Studies on "Spenser and Race," and the critics who have addressed the racialized portrayal of Jews, Muslims, Amerindians, and Africans in Spenser. We will consider these local critical conversations in the context of, and in comparison to, broader conversations in early modern studies about race and ethnicity (featuring such critics as Ania Loomba, Ayanna Thompson Mary Floyd Wilson, Kim F. Hall, Janet Adelman, and Dympna Callaghan). Dividing our attentions between primary texts and critical evaluation of the scholarship will make this course useful, I hope, both to early modernists seeking a deeper understanding of the field and to non-specialists interested in the literary history of racial and racist rhetoric.
Teaching Method
Discussion.
Evaluation Method
Regular class preparation and participation
In-class presentations
Final paper (broken into abstract/proposal, annotated bibliography/literature review, outline, first draft, peer review, final draft)
MFA+MA students and interested Ph.D. students may propose alternative final projects that are more germane to their professional goals.
Class Materials (Required)
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, second edition, ed. A.C. Hamilton et. al, Longman Annotated English Poets (ISBN-13: 978-1405832816; ISBN-10: 1405832819).
Additional readings will be available on Canvas.
Texts will be available at: Norris bookstore.