FACT AND FICTION: THE SLIPPERINESS OF “TRUTH” IN RENAISSANCE LITERATURE

NATIONAL AND KAPODISTRIAN UNIVERSITY OF ATHENS

SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY

FACULTY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

SPRING SEMESTER 2024

8^thSEMESTER COURSE: FACT AND FICTION: THE SLIPPERINESS OF “TRUTH” IN RENAISSANCE LITERATURE

Instructor: Associate Professor Vassiliki Markidou

Week-by-week sessions on Wednesdays, 9-12 am, Room 824

Office hour: Wednesdays, 12:00-13:00, Room 903

Course Description

The course will focus on two important and related strategies of Renaissance literature: the boundary between fact and fiction, and the slipperiness in any truth claim -as concerns the divine, the material world, and the self.  A variety of contemporary texts, both “literary” (plays, poems and prose narratives) and “non-literary” (legal documents, scientific tracts, travel reports, engravings, conduct books) will be studied. An “anatomy” of Renaissance English society (that spans from 1485 to 1660) as regards its politics, art, religion and science will be conducted in relation to the above-mentioned foci. This analysis will forge an appreciation of the multifaceted as well as contradictory ways in which early modern men and women perceived and represented themselves, the divine, and the material world. The selected texts aim to outline the period under review, and reflect the complexities of the early modern era as delineated in the work of Skelton up to that of Milton respectively. The class will be conducted in the form of lecture-cum-discussion. Reading the weekly allocated material in advance is requested and student participation is strongly recommended.

Course objectives

• to appreciate the crucial role of mythmaking in the construction of subjectivity
• to be familiarized with the historical, social, political, cultural and religious context of early modern literature
• to challenge given concepts, myths, and prejudices related to the divine element, the material world and the self
• to apply critical theories (ancient and contemporary) in analyzing both "literary" and "non-literary" texts

Course requirements 

• Mid-term exam (50%)
• Final exam (50%)
• Extra credit opportunity: write an essay on a particular topic related to either one or two of the allocated primary texts (after consulting your instructor) and get extra credit (1 or 2 marks -depending on the outcome- granted on condition that you pass the exams).

Course schedule and required (primary) texts

Week 1: Introduction to the Renaissance and its preoccupation with 'truth' and illusion 

Week 2:  John Skelton, "The Bowge of Court"; Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder, "Whoso list to hunt": authority and fiction

Week 3: Sir Thomas More, Utopia: the politics of utopia

Week 3: John Calvin, The Institution of Christian Religion; Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity; Sir Thomas Hoby's translation of Castiglione's The Courtier; fact and fiction in key early modern religious and political texts

Week 4: Elizabeth I, Speech to the Troops at Tilbury; Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender [Aprill]; the complexities of Elizabethan iconography

Week 5; Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, 45; William Shakespeare: Sonnets, 130; petrarchan conventions, 'truth' and illusion

Week 6: Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy: violence, revenge and equivocation

Week 7: Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy: justice, power, and theatricality

Week 8: John Donne, “The Ecstasy”; Andrew Marvell, “The Garden”; Henry Vaughan, “The Retreat”: the fluid boundaries bewteen the secular and  the religious 

Week 9: Ben Jonson, The Masque of Blackness: praise and critique, race and colonialism 

Week 10: Lady Mary Wroth, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, 40; Edmund Waller, “The Story of Phoebus and Daphne Applied”: myth, gender and betrayal

Week 11:  John Ford, The Broken Heart: the politics of friendship

Week 12: John Ford, The Broken Heart: body, gender and power

Week 13:  John Milton: “L’Allegro” & “Il Penseroso”: the politics of allegory

Critical Theories (mainly from The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism)

Plato: Ion (excerpt), Republic (Books. II, III, X)

Plotinus: Fifth Ennead (excerpt)

Carl Gustav Jung: “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry”

Roland Barthes: “The Death of the Author”

Louis Althusser: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (excerpt)

Jean Baudrillard: The Procession of Simulacra (excerpt)

Stephen Greenblatt: Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (excerpt)

Edward Said: Orientalism (excerpt)

Judith Butler: Gender Trouble (excerpt)

Elaine Scarry: The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (excerpt)

List of Suggested Readings (on reserve in the library)

Boesky, Amy. Founding Fictions: Utopias in Early Modern England. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-fashioning: from More to Shakespeare. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Hattaway, Michael, ed. A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003.

Hattaway, Michael. Renaissance and Reformations: An Introduction to Early Modern English Literature. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.

Kinney, Arthur F., ed. A Companion to Renaissance Drama.Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.

Rivers, Isabel. Classical and Christian Ideas in English Renaissance Poetry: A Student’s Guide. London: Routledge, 1994.

WWW Resources

Free-access specialist journal  Early Modern Literary Studies (https://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/journal/index.php/emls)