ENGL 6330

Satire, Sensibility, Imitation, and Mechanism in Eighteenth Century Literature

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2015-2016.

A survey of poetry, fiction, and drama, with attention to philosophy, aesthetics, theories of acting, and the rhetoric of couplet poetry. We will focus on how materialist and mechanistic discourse inflects the discourses of the period: originality, imitation, and replication; parody and satire; sentiment and sensibility; gender, sexuality, and pornography. We will explore the relationship between the spontaneous, original, and authentic, and the mechanical, replicated, and performative. Writers may include: Rochester, Dryden, Wycherley, Swift, Pope, Fielding, Cleland, Mackenzie, Sterne, Hume, La Mettrie, Johnson, Kant, and Burke. Readings by critics and theorists such as Horkheimer, Adorno, Cassirer, Benjamin, Kenner, Foucault, Roach, Bhabha, and others. This seminar is for students wishing to explore thematic and theoretical approaches to the period and those preparing to teach undergraduates in eighteenth-century literature.

When Offered Fall.

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