Sarah Kunjummen

Beginning with influential classical texts, including the poetry of Sappho and Ovid's Heroides, this class explores early modern articulations of female complaint, both in women's writing of the period and as depicted by male writers. The course takes up some works in the mode of gender apologetic and polemic, including excerpts from Christine de Pisan's City of Ladies, Chaucer's "Legend of Good Women" and Rachel Speght's "A Mouzell for Melastomus." It also tracks poetic complaint in the works of such writers as Aemilia Lanyer, John Donne ("Sappho to Philaenis"), Katherine Philips, and Aphra Behn, and excerpts of women's life-writing by Margaret Cavendish, Lucy Hutchinson, and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. The class turns to contemporary critical frameworks including affect and trauma studies in order to explore the dynamics of how these texts stage questions of suffering, sympathy and representability. (Medieval/Early Modern)

Lyric has often been perceived as a peculiarly intimate genre, tasked with providing access to a person’s inner experience. This course will examine how sixteenth and seventeenth-century British writers used lyric verse as a tool for establishing, imagining or faking intimacy, with potential lovers, employers, friends, and God. We will ask how the multiple models of intimacy available within English literary culture intersected in texts of the period, and also how that literature responds to or compares with developments elsewhere in the Renaissance Atlantic and Mediterranean world. Along the way, we will explore some of the following questions: what was the gender politics of Renaissance lyric? How did writers make space for queer or heteronormative writing and attachment within the conventions of the love poem? What looks familiar about the forms of intimacy we find in these texts? What remains profoundly strange about them? Readings will include poems by Philip Sidney, Mary Wroth, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Katherine Philips and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.