Human/Animal Hybridity and Navigation of Species Boundaries in Renaissance Literature and Drama
This course will focus on changing ideas of humans and animals, and human-animal relations in the Renaissance as expressed in the literature and drama of the time. We will explore the shifting paradigms governing the status and role of animals, beginning in classical antiquity and moving forward through medieval Europe to England in the Renaissance. In this period, the definition of the human is closely tied to the definition of the animal. At one extreme species exist hierarchically, and in tension with each other, while elsewhere the borders between humans and animals are being crossed, and even erased. We will consider how these factors are implicated in the political, philosophical, religious and social ideas of the period, and how they might influence the possibility of inter-species and same-species empathy. We will reflect particularly on how representations of animals, humans as animals, and human-animal hybrids are made to figure in subject-formation, moral discourses, and especially in formulations of class, race, and gender relations in the English Renaissance. Our field of study will include both literary and theatrical texts and other kinds of documents, from biblical accounts, classical natural history, and medieval bestiaries to records of animal trials, medical treatments, and anatomical studies. We will read accounts of bear-baiting, menagerie keeping, hunting, falconry, and riding, and we will explore attitudes towards animals as pets, property, mounts, guards, hunters, musicians, and meat. For their assignments, students will choose a selection of books and articles from the burgeoning fields of Renaissance-focused Animal Studies and Eco-critical scholarship. Together, we will examine how some literary and dramatic works use animals, and animal imagery, especially in order to interrogate, exalt, degrade, or otherwise mediate the contentious category of the human.
Texts:
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queen, selections from Books 1, 2 & 3;
William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear; Margaret Cavendish, “The Hunting of the Hare”; Ben Jonson, Volpone; John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi; John Milton, selections from Paradise Lost
Secondary Texts:
selections from Aristotle, De Anima, De Animalibus Historia;
selections from Bestiary, trans. & ed. Richard Barber, selections from The Book of Beasts, Being a Translation from a Latin Bestiary of the Twelfth Century, ed. & trans. T. H. White; Sir Philip Sidney, selections from The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia; selections from Michel de Montaigne, Apology for Raimond Sebond;”, selections from Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
Course Requirements:
One in-class mid-term essay (25%), one term paper (40%), one creative presentation or theatre review, together with class participation (5%), and a final exam (30%).