English 211A: Literature 1500-1800
Instructor: Sam Hushagen, PhD Email: samhus85@uw.edu
Class Times: Class Location: ARC G070
M/W 11:30-1:20 Office: PDL TBD
Office Hours: M, W 2-3pm (and by appt.)
Course Description
Sources of Selfhood: Humanism and Naturalism in the Renaissance
“What is your substance? Whereof are you made . . .?” Shakespeare asks at the beginning of Sonnet 53. The urgency of his inquiry might be lost on us “moderns” – an important term for the period we will be studying – because for us substance doesn’t have the same thickness it had in the 16th century. But in “substance” – literally sub-, meaning below, and -stantia, that which stands or supports – echoes an emerging discourse that we might recognize: what are human beings made of? What kind of stuff are we? Are we the same compounded organic material as everything else? Or something else, something spiritual and immaterial? Are we some soul-stuff that suffuses our physical bodies but without being identical or reducible to them, a kind of ghost in the machine, or are we, as Thomas Hobbes would have it, just animated matter? In this class, we will look at ideas of selfhood from the Renaissance to Romanticism: where it comes from, what it is made of, how one becomes a person, and the contingent boundaries that separate persons from animals and other forms of organized matter. We will do so with an eye to the history of these questions and their contemporary currency to debates about “naturalism” and normativity.
The Renaissance period is frequently identified with “humanism,” as in the common phrase “Renaissance Humanism.” We will consider what that means, and also track the shadow of this humanism in forms of “Naturalism.” In the parlance of modern philosophy, “Naturalism” can be described as a worldview in which sensible experience, norms, value, and meaning reduce without remainder to physical laws, matter in motion. It is worth considering that the period giving rise to “Humanism” also cultivated forms of anti-humanism and philosophical naturalism: scientific, poetic, fictional, and philosophical projects that challenged the human as the special wonder of creation and organizing center of the world, resubmerging it into the cascade of matter through void that gives rise to the world. These discourses – naturalism, or what we might call “materialism” and “humanism” emerged as foils in this tumultuous period and need one another. Pressingly, these contraries still operate and depend upon one another. They continue to animate enduring questions: what is foundationally and essentially human? What is merely accidental? Are we but products of our time and place, or is there some core, a priori selfhood that makes us who we are? Nature or Nurture? Materialism or spiritualism? These dichotomies haunt contemporary philosophy and science. Our task will be to understand how they took shape between 1500 and 1800, who the key players were, and what kinds of things they thought and said.
Course Goals
- Introduction to central texts, ideas, authors, and questions as developed in philosophy and literature from the Renaissance to Romanticism
- Introduction to practices of attentive and deliberate reading, and collaborative discussion of literature;
- Introduction to writing about literature for a broad audience, and practice developing, refining, and clarifying your thinking through informal and more formal techniques of writing;
- Cultivate student capacities for imaginative intellectual experience
Course Structure
The course is designed with a loose chronology. We will look at some sixteenth century (1500s) texts (Petrarch, Montaigne, Shakespeare) before turning to seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophy, poetry, and fiction. There will be considerable reading and my expectation is that you do all of it. You can expect 50-100 pages of reading a week. The point is not to master everything you read, but to practice forms of sustained reading that are increasingly marginal in our popular culture (social media, TikTok etc) but still absolutely essential to university study and to the lifelong, skillful reading that you should strive to develop through your college education. You can consider the time spend reading protest against a culture that demands constant activity – multitasking, answering emails, responding to texts, completing busywork assignments. My hope is that you practice just reading in this class, in addition to the essential, collaborative skills of discussing hard things productively with your peers.
Given these goals, it follows that participation is essential to successfully achieving them. Though it often takes place in solitude, reading is fundamentally a social activity. Students are expected to bring questions and/or constructive observations about the assigned text. Your attendance will have an effect on your participation grade (see below) because you cannot actively participate without being present. But participation is not restricted to physical presence; it includes engaged listening as well as speaking and includes courtesy in the classroom. You will be expected to take part in class discussions, so you should resign yourself now to the fact that you will have to speak up at times in class and respond to the readings. These requirements should be very easy to fulfill, and no one should really suffer because of them unless they are simply neglected or brushed aside. While you may be able to get by with missing a few class sessions, it is worth noting that regular absences can only have an adverse effect on your grade.
“W,” or Additional Writing Requirements
As an “Additional Writing” course that fulfills 5 credits of the “W” requirement, this course will feature a mixture of low-stakes and high-stakes writing. Low stakes writing will include regular in-class reflective writing that will be turned in for participation credit at the end of the day, in addition to weekly discussion forum posts. The posts are not meant to demonstrate mastery, but rather to practice quoting from the text and working those quotations into the fabric of your own writing and thinking. They are exploratory and open-ended and will receive credit so long as they demonstrate earnest intellectual engagement and meet the minimum requirements for length. You will also be expected to demonstrate substantive engagement with the posts of at least two of your classmates. Think of this as like a smarter version of Reddit, only without upvoting.
High stakes writing will require you to refine the skills of quotation and analysis practiced in the low-stakes assignments, but with the expectation that you are providing accurate citations and demonstrating careful, attentive analysis of materials you quote from. The Midterm assignment will include a mixture of short-answer and short essay questions. If you are unhappy with the outcome of your midterm, you are invited to revise and resubmit it for reevaluation. The course final will include different options, including creative options for exploring our themes and questions in different forms and media. This project will be developed over the last three weeks of the term, and you will have the opportunity to receive feedback and revise your project accordingly.
Key Dates
Friday, 11/3: Midterm Assignment Due
Wednesday, 12/13: Final assignment Due
Materials
- Paradise Lost, John Milton (Oxford World Classics)
- King Lear, William Shakespeare (Oxford Shakespeare)
- Robinson Crusoe, William Defoe (Oxford World Classics)
- Dependable internet access for Canvas and Google Drive
- Course Packet available for purchase at Professional Copy and Print (on 42nd and University)
- UW email address you check at least once a day (please no forwarding)
Assessment
This class will be evaluated using contract grading. A grading contract is exactly what it sounds like: you sign up for a certain grade (4.0, 3.5, 3.0, 2.5, 2.0). Each grade level has certain requirements articulated clearly in the contract that you and I both sign at the beginning of the quarter. You may renegotiate your contract up or down once during the quarter, but not within the last two weeks. Failure to fulfill your contract will result in a grade that corresponds to the amount of work actually completed. The goal of the contract is to emphasize learning over evaluation, and to give you room to explore ideas and develop skills that are important to you.
Participation:
Being an active member of this community is imperative to you and your peers’ success in this course. Come to class prepared and stay engaged through the session and you’ll receive participation credit for that day. If you miss class: it’s your responsibility to email me and tell me what you missed (obviously, what this means is you will have talked to one of your wonderful peers to get up to speed). From there, we’ll set up a way for you to make up participation. Participation is central to the grading contract, and failure to fulfill the participation requirements amounts to a failure to fulfill your contract. The first item on the grading contract is participation. I expect to hear from everyone in this class, no exceptions, and will keep track of participation in an Excel spreadsheet. If I am not hearing from you, you will be asked to come discuss why with me in office hours.
Late and Incomplete Work
All projects (midterm and final) are due on Canvas by midnight on the date and in the file format specified. Projects that are submitted late, are in the wrong file format, or don’t meet minimum requirements will not receive feedback and be returned with the opportunity for resubmission. If you would like feedback on a late or incomplete assignment, come see me during office hours and we can discuss it. If you require an extension for a given project, let me know at least 24 hours before the deadline.
All assignments must reach minimum requirements in order to receive credit and thus a passing grade for this course.
Classroom Policies
I am experimenting with a hard and fast no screens policy this quarter. During the pandemic, we were all on Zoom and it was terrible. After the pandemic, we were partly on Zoom, partly not, and usually in some hybrid form, which was terrible, too, but in different ways. I have severe technology exhaustion, and I’m sure many of you do as well given how much of your time is spent engaging with digital rectangles. So, let’s try something novel and keep all screens away for the duration of our class. When we take a break, you can check your phone etc., but during class, no laptops, no phones, no tablets. All the readings are available in hard copy for a reason, and my expectation is that you will bring the texts we are reading that day with you to class.
Academic Integrity
Plagiarism, or academic dishonesty, is presenting someone else's ideas or writing as your own. In your projects for this class, you are encouraged to refer to other people's thoughts and writing as long as you cite them. As a matter of policy, any student found to have plagiarized any piece of writing in this class will be immediately reported to the College of Arts and Sciences for review.
Note on ChatGPT/Bing/Bard etc.: Any unacknowledged use of ChatGPT or other AI applications to generate writing included in your papers and discussion posts is plagiarism, just like the unacknowledged inclusion of material from any other source. Since ChatGPT is a particularly unreliable source, I strongly advise you to make no use of it whatsoever. Texts generated by ChatGPT are full of banal generalizations and arbitrary errors—traits which often make its products easily recognizable. If you use ChatGPT to generate content for essays, you may not be aware of the telltale mistakes and conceptual reductions it produces. Moreover, these will make your writing worse, not better. Most importantly: the point of university is not merely to advance toward a degree, but to learn, to think, to challenge yourself to understand and arrive at new ideas. Writing is a practice of taking responsibility for our thoughts, and it is also a practice of thinking in its own right, which relies on the arduous and rewarding process of composition and revision. Since the use of ChatGPT as a shortcut to circumvent that process is contrary to these goals and values, reliance upon it will be treated with no zero tolerance. When I suspect ChatGPT has been used to generate material in papers or discussion posts, I call a student to my office for an in-depth discussion of their essay and their writing process. If I conclude that a chat engine or other application has been used without acknowledgement, the assignment will be treated as plagiarized work.
Additional Policies and Resources
There is more information regarding class and departmental policies as well as on-campus resources available on the Canvas page under “Student Resources.” Please visit this page early in the quarter for information regarding student accommodation, writing and research help centers, departmental contact information, and community and counseling resources.
Religious Accommodation Clause
Washington state law requires that UW develop a policy for accommodation of student absences or significant hardship due to reasons of faith or conscience, or for organized religious activities. The UW’s policy, including more information about how to request an accommodation, is available at Faculty Syllabus Guidelines and Resources. Accommodations must be requested within the first two weeks of this course using the Religious Accommodations Request form available at https://registrar.washington.edu/students/religious-accommodations-request/.
Accessibility Clause
Your experience in this class is important to me. It is the policy and practice of the University of Washington to create inclusive and accessible learning environments consistent with federal and state law. If you have already established accommodations with Disability Resources for Students (DRS), please activate your accommodations via myDRS so we can discuss how they will be implemented in this course.
If you have not yet established services through DRS, but have a temporary health condition or permanent disability that requires accommodations (conditions include but not limited to; mental health, attention-related, learning, vision, hearing, physical or health impacts), contact DRS directly to set up an Access Plan. DRS facilitates the interactive process that establishes reasonable accommodations. Contact DRS at disability.uw.edu.
Course Calendar
Arrive to class having completed the reading and any preparations listed under “Homework/ Reading Due” for a given day in order to receive participation points for that day. You may occasionally be asked to complete short quizzes to ensure you’re suitably prepared.
Disclaimer: This calendar is subject to change. I’ll do my best to alert you to changes well in advance, but it’s your responsibility to stay up-to-date. Email me if you’re not sure how to prepare for class.
Week One (Wed 10/27)
Syllabus
Week Two (M 10/2, W 10/4)
-Montaigne, “Of Cannibals” (Course Packet); Petrarch, Selected Sonnets
-Hobbes, Intro “De Cive” and Leviathan, “Of Commonwealth” (Course Packet)
-Shakespeare, Selected Sonnets (Course Packet)
Week Three (M 10/9, W 10/11)
-Shakespeare, King Lear Act I-II
-Lear Act III
Week Four (M 10/16, W 10/18)
-Lear Act IV-V
-Descartes, Meditations (course packet)
Week Five (M 10/23, W 10/25)
-Lucy Hutchinson, De Rerum Natura translation (Course Packet)
-Hobbes, Leviathan “Of Sense” (Course Packet)
-Milton, Paradise Lost Book One
Week Six (M 10/30, W 11/1)
-Paradise Lost Book Two, Book Three
-Paradise Lost Book Four, Book Five
Week Seven (M 11/6, W 11/8)
-Paradise Lost Book Six, Book Seven, and Book Eight (Note: seven and 8 were originally one - IMO these can be read less carefully)
-Paradise Lost Book Nine, Book Ten
Week Eight (M 11/13, W 11/15)
- Paradise Lost Book Eleven, Book 12
-Francis Bacon, Excerpts
-Margaret Cavendish, excerpts
-Alexander Pope, “Essay on Man” Epistles I, II
Week Nine (M 11/20, W 11/22)
-Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
-Robinson Crusoe
Week Ten (M 11/27, W. 11/29)
-Robinson Crusoe
-Mid-Century Sentimentalism and the rise of Romanticism: Gray, Cowper, Wordsworth
Week Eleven
-Wordsworth; Coleridge
-Charlotte Smith
Midterm Due: Friday, 11/3
Final Due: Wednesday, 12/13