Studies in Poetry: Gender and Lyric -- Renaissance Men and Women Writing about Love, Spring 2003
- Author:
- Fuller, Mary C.
- Subject:
- Humanities, Social Sciences
- Institution Name:
- M.I.T.
- Collection:
- MIT OpenCourseWare
- Grade Level:
- Post-secondary
- Abstract:
Extensive reading of works by a few major poets. Emphasizes the evolution of each poet's work and the questions of poetic influence and literary tradition. Instruction and practice in oral and written communication. Topic for Fall: Does Poetry Matter? Topic for Spring: Gender and Lyric Poetry. The core of this seminar will be the great sequences of English love sonnets written by William Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Mary Wroth. These poems cover an enormous amount of aesthetic and psychological ground: ranging from the utterly subjective to the entirely public or conventional, from licit to forbidden desires, they might also serve as a manual of experimentation with the resources of sound, rhythm, and figuration in poetry. Around these sequences, we will develop several other contexts, using both Renaissance texts and modern accounts: the Petrarchan literary tradition (poems by Francis Petrarch and Sir Thomas Wyatt); the social, political, and ethical uses of love poetry (seduction, getting famous, influencing policy, elevating morals, compensating for failure); other accounts of ideal masculinity and femininity (conduct manuals, theories of gender and anatomy); and the other limits of the late sixteenth century vogue for love poetry: narrative poems, pornographic poems, poems that don't work.
- Languages:
- English
- Material Type:
- Full Course, Homework and Assignments, Syllabi
- Media Format:
- Text/HTML, Downloadable docs
- Conditions of Use:
-
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
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