ENGL46530: The Uses of Literature: Power to Pleasure

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• To understand the varied ethical, political, personal, social, and economic uses and functions that Renaissance authors ascribed to literature;
• To investigate how Renaissance ideas about the purposes and uses of literature informed and shaped the formal, aesthetic, rhetorical, and generic qualities of specific literary works;
• To explore how these ideas about the purposes and uses of literature were shaped by a range of (often unacknowledged) ideological, institutional, political, and economic interests and pressures;
• To historicize the concepts of literature and literary studies, tracing their origins in related discourses and practices including rhetoric, philology, and scriptural hermeneutics; and to connect Renaissance ideas about the uses of literature to twenty-first century debates regarding the value of the humanities;
• To consider how Literary Studies as a discipline has, from its earliest inception, been shaped by the exclusion of gendered, raced, and classed others, and on how it has been used as a tool to create and sustain structures of exclusion and oppression;
• To prompt critical reflection, guided by relevant philosophical and theoretical frameworks, on the notion that reading and writing literature are (or should be) instrumental or purpose-driven activities.

• Why bother reading, writing, or studying literature? And what is literature, anyway? Variations on these questions have been asked numerous times throughout history, but they became particularly pressing in the Renaissance, when rapid and dramatic social, economic, religious, and political changes made defining the value of reading and writing literary works in the vernacular a matter of urgent concern. This module has two central foci. First, it explores the Renaissance conception of literature as a means of intervening in the world and transforming the minds and lives of individual readers, connecting this tradition to the aesthetic, formal, and rhetorical features of specific works. Second, it investigates how Renaissance ideas about the uses of literature continue to inform debates about the uses (or conversely, uselessness) of the humanities today. The module will coalesce around four (distinct but interlocking) themes namely Power, Health, Self-Help, and Pleasure with two seminars dedicated to each, plus a final concluding seminar. Each seminar will focus on a specific work or works of Renaissance literature, including prose writing by Michel De Montaigne, Robert Burton, Thomas More, and Thomas Nashe; plays by William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson; and poetry by Philip Sidney, John Milton, Hester Pulter, and John Wilmot. But they will also juxtapose these works with a selection of more modern sources which exemplify or explore attitudes to and ideas about the uses of literature and the humanities more broadly in the twentieth and twenty-first century, in order to consider the extent to which Renaissance ideas endure today. These will include, for instance, policy documents and newspaper articles, as well as critical and theoretical works including Helen Smalls The Value of the Humanities and Rita Felskis Uses of Literature.

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• On completion of this module, students will possess:
• Knowledge of how the uses of literature were understood in the Renaissance, and how Renaissance discourses continue to inform ideas about the value of the humanities today;
• Awareness of the historicity of literature and literary studies, including genealogical links between Renaissance humanism and the modern humanities;
• Understanding of how literary traditions and genres have been informed by, and reciprocally informed, literary-critical and philosophical ideas about the value and uses of literature.

Subject-specific Skills:

• Students studying this module will develop:
• sophisticated close reading and analytical skills;
• an understanding of the formal and aesthetic dimensions of literature;
• appreciation of the cultural, intellectual, socio-political and linguistic contexts of literature;
• an ability to lucidly communicate an advanced knowledge and understanding of conceptual or theoretical literary material;
• an advanced command of a broad range of vocabulary and critical literary terminology.

Key Skills:

• Students studying this module will develop:
• general research skills, including an advanced ability to acquire complex information in systematic and time-effective ways;
• an advanced ability to analyse and interpret such complex information, and to assess its credibility;
• critical initiative and independence of thought and judgement;
• sophisticated communication skills; clarity of thought and expression;
• expertise in conventions of scholarly presentation and bibliographical skills;
• proficiency in information-technology skills including word-processing and electronic data access;
• professional organisation and time-management skills.

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