The British Field | Renaissance home page | Department of English

 

Richard Strier

Richard Strier

Frank L. Sulzberger Distinguished Service Professor
Department of English
Divinity School

Office: Walker 406
Phone: (773) 702-8006
rastrier@uchicago.edu

My passion is to bring together two modes of literary study that have, traditionally but needlessly, been seen as antagonistic: formalism and historicism.  I am deeply interested in the intellectual history of the early modern period, especially theological and political ideas, but I am interested not only in the ideas themselves but in the ways in which they find their way into English and American literature in the period.  My book on George Herbert attempts to demonstrate how deeply the central ideas of Reformation theology are at work in the intricate tonal and structural details of the lyrics.  My more recent book, Resistant Structures, brings together methodological and historical concerns.  It critiques and tries to work free of various critical and historical schemes and presuppositions; it refuses to idealize "devout humanism" and it refuses to see the thought-world of early modern England as fundamentally conservative and deferential to authority.  I demonstrate the presence of resistance to authority in works by Donne (Satire 3), Shakespeare (King Lear), and, in the Restoration period, Nahum Tate (in his adaptation of Lear).  My current work continues these endeavors in a contextualized edition of the quarto of Lear, and in a book in progress ("The Unrepentant Renaissance") on praise of pride, passion, and impatience in the Renaissance.  My teaching, especially at the graduate level, has followed the whole range of my interests (see below).  I have directed dissertations on topics ranging from villain heroes to representations of taverns to the poetics of inarticulateness in Herbert and Dickinson.

Courses:

Graduate: Women Poets of the Seventeenth Century; Shakespeare and Skepticism; Society and Politics in Shakespeare's Plays; Lear/Lears; The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies; Modes of Renaissance Lyric; Metaphysical Poetry; The Religious Lyric In England and America; John Donne in History and Theory; Renaissance Intellectual Texts: Petrarch to Descartes; Cavell and Criticism.

Undergraduate: Reading Cultures; Philosophical Perspectives; Shakespeare I: Histories and Comedies; Shakespeare II: Tragedies and Romances; Introduction to Poetry; The Development of Shakespearean Comedy; Lyric Poetry from Donne to Dryden; Literary Criticism from Plato to T. S. Eliot.

Selected Publications:

  • Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (University of California Press, 1995) [The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics, 34]); paperback, 1997.
  • Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert's Poetry (University of Chicago Press, 1983); paperback, 1986.
  • (ed. with Derek Hirst) Writing and Political Engagement in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
  • (ed. with Donna B. Hamilton) Religion, Literature and Politics in Post-Reformation England, 1540-1688 (Cambridge University Press, 1996).
  • (ed. with David L. Smith and David Bevington) The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London, 1576-1649 (Cambridge University Press, 1995); paperback edition, 2002.
  • "Martin Luther and the Real Presence in Nature," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37 (Spring, 2007), 271-303.
  • "Self-Disclosure and Self-Satisfaction in Montaigne and Descartes," Prose Studies 29 (December, 2007), special issue on Renaissance Prose, 405-426.
  • "Shakespeare against Morality," in Reading Renaissance Ethics, ed. Marshall Grossman (Routledge, 2007).
  • "George Herbert and Ironic Ekphrasis," in Ekphrasis, ed. Shadi Bartsch and Jas Elster (forthcoming special issue of Classical Philology 101 (January, 2007).
  • "The Refusal to be Judged in Petrarch and Shakespeare," in Blackwell's Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets (Blackwell's, 2006), 206-225.
  • "Against the Rule of Reason: Praise of Passion from Petrarch to Luther to Shakespeare to Herbert," in Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, & Mary Floyd-Wilson (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), pp. 23-42.
  • "How Formalism Became a Dirty Word, and Why We Can't Do Without It," in Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements, ed. Mark Rasmussen (Palgrave Press, 2002), pp. 207-215.
  • "Shakespeare and the Skeptics" Religion and Literature 32 (2000), pp. 171-196 (special issue on Heterodoxy in the English Renaissance).
  • "Milton's Fetters, or, Why Eden is Better than Heaven" in John Milton: the Author in His Works, ed. Michael Lieb and Albert Labriola, Milton Studies 38 (2000), pp. 169-197.
  • "Milton against Humility," in Religion and Culture in the English Renaissance, ed. Claire McEachern & Debora Shuger (Cambridge U. Press, 1997), pp. 258-286.
  • "John Donne Awry and Squint: The 'Holy Sonnets,' 1608-10," Modern Philology 86 (May, 1989), 357-384. [Featured in Margaret Edson's, Wit, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1999].

Education:

Ph.D., Harvard University, 1976.  Teaching at Chicago since 1973.

Department of English
The University of Chicago
1115 East 58th Street
Chicago, IL 60637

© 2009 The University of Chicago
Last updated: December 2007

 

The British Field | Renaissance home page | Department of English