In this course, we will become acquainted with the classical rhetorical curriculum, which was placed in the schools at the beginning of the Renaissance and which influenced the literary production in Britain until the close of the 18th century and in America until the middle of the 19th century. We will examine this influence in the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Renaissance devotional poets, Jonathan Swift, and Herman Melville, authors who expected their audiences to read with a rhetorical lens. Then we will end the course asking whether the rhetorical features we have discovered in these works can be found in more contemporary literature written without any influence from classical rhetoric, and whether the rhetorical tools we have used for analysis have relevance for this so-called “non-rhetorical” literature. We will come to conclusions about how these authors viewed rhetoric and how useful rhetoric is as a literary theory. In the course, we will write several reading analyses, 1 or 2 short papers, an exam, and a final research project.
Required Texts: A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd ed., Richard Lanham; The Ad Herennium; The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 1; Love’s Labor’s Lost, William Shakespeare; Paradise Regained, John Milton; The Confidence Man, Herman Melville
The Fantastic is a borderline literature that inhabits a space between two genres. On one hand there are stories of the strange but true, and on the other there are marvelous stories and exist outside the world as we know it. Fantastic literature keeps the reader guessing for as long as possible, asking us to question what is real and what is imagined, what is natural and what is supernatural. We will begin this course by reading Tzvetan Todorov’s important theoretical definition of the genre, and then examine fictions that attempt to blur the line between scientific and supernatural explanations of the unexplainable. Our readings will center on the 19th century when ghosts, monsters, doubles, and weird science gain a particularly strong foothold in popular literature.
Readings will include: The Fantastic: Tzvetan Todorov; Fantastic Tales, Italo Calvino (ed.); The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde; The Turn of the Screw, Henry James; The Back Room, Carmen Martin Gaite; “The Secret Sharer,” Joseph Conrad; “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman; “Le Horla,” Guy de Maupassant; “The Uncanny,” Sigmund Freud