Teaching & Learning Guide for: Renaissance Literary Studies after Theory: Aesthetics, History and the Human
Authors: Mousley Andy 
Published: June 2007

Author Recommends:

The essay unsettles the oppositions it identifies between ‘little’ and ‘big’ theories, historical particulars and universals, ‘sceptical’ and ‘evangelical’ conceptions of the value of literature, but two essays which taken together exemplify the differences at stake are: David Scott Kastan, ‘“The King hath many marching in his Coats,” or, What did you do in the War, Daddy’, in his Shakespeare after Theory (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 130–47; and David Ruiter, ‘Harry’s (in)human face’, in Spiritual Shakespeares, ed. Ewan Fernie (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 50–72. Because they both discuss the same play (I Henry IV), these essays will help to make concrete the issues with which Mousley deals. Kastan’s essay is mainly interested in time‐bound historical questions, while Ruiter’s is concerned with timeless, ‘existential’ ones.

From here it would be useful to consider some more explicit discussion of the ostensibly ‘human’ value of literature. Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human (1998) sparked considerable controversy and this is reflected in the responses of the diverse assortment of critics gathered together in Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare, ed. Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer (New York: Palgrave, 2001).

Two further discussions of the putatively humanising effects of literature which are worth comparing and contrasting are: Robert N. Watson, ‘Teaching “Shakespeare”: Theory versus Practice’, in Teaching Literature: What is Needed Now, ed. James Engell and David Perkins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 121–50 and Jonathan Dollimore’s introduction to the third edition of his Radical Tragedy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004; first published 1984), pp. xiv–xl.

Online Materials:

A special edition of the refereed online journal Working Papers on the Web is devoted to the topic of ‘Literature and Value’: http://extra.shu.ac.uk/wpw/value/wpw.htm

The refereed online journal Early Modern Literary Studies has a range of scholarly articles and reviews: http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/emlshome.html

Sample Syllabus (1): Shakespeare, Wisdom and Modernity (Undergraduate Level 3)

Outline

Can Shakespeare help us with the question of how to live? Is it possible, in the destabilising world of modernity to which he himself contributed, to view Shakespeare as a source of existential wisdom and guidance? Surely the combined forces of scepticism, historicism and specialisation have put paid to the faith in the universally valid wisdom of sages. ‘Criticism for the past two generations’, writes Margreta de Grazia in ‘The Ideology of Superfluous Things: King Lear as Period Piece’ (1996), ‘has tended to situate Shakespeare in history rather than assume his universality’. Although de Grazia wrote this over ten years ago, universals are still distrusted. This course will identify the nature and variety of Shakespeare’s scepticism about human nature, but it will balance this Shakespeare with one who works against the total alienation of human beings from themselves.

Sample Programme

Part 1 (weeks 1–6): Reading for Scepticism

Hamlet

Othello

Measure for Measure

Required Secondary Reading: Lars Engle, Measure for Measure and Modernity: The Problem of the Sceptic’s Authority’, in Shakespeare and Modernity, ed. Hugh Grady (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 85–104.

Part 2 (weeks 7–12): Reading for Guidance

Coriolanus

As You Like It

Macbeth

Required Secondary Reading: Andy Mousley, ‘Renaissance Literary Studies after Theory: Aesthetics, History and the Human’, Literature Compass, October, 2004, http://www.literature‐compass.com

Sample Syllabus (2): Shakespeare and the Critics (Undergraduate Level 3)

Outline

This course examines representative examples of influential twentieth‐ and twenty‐first century critical trends, from the humanism which dominated most of Anglo‐American criticism up to and including the 1970s, to the varieties of cultural criticism that have become influential since that time, to the recent so‐called ‘turn’ or ‘return’ to ethics and the ‘re‐humanising’ of Shakespeare. A small number of Shakespeare’s plays will be used as the focus for the critical and theoretical perspectives examined on the course.

Sample Programme

Weeks 1–2: The Current State of Renaissance Literary Studies

Andy Mousley, ‘Renaissance Literary Studies after Theory: Aesthetics, History and the Human’, Literature Compass, October, 2004, http://www.literature‐compass.com

Week 3: Humanist Shakespeare

The Merchant of Venice

C. L. Barber, ‘The Merchants and the Jew of Venice: Wealth’s Communion and an Intruder’, in his Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), pp. 163–191.

Week 4–5: Cultural Criticism (1): Shakespeare in Ideology

The Merchant of Venice

Michael Ferber, ‘The Ideology of The Merchant of Venice’, English Literary Renaissance, 20 (1990), 431–64.

Week 6: Cultural Criticism (2): Sexual Politics

The Merchant of Venice

Catherine Belsey, ‘Love in Venice’, Shakespeare Survey, 44 (1991). 41–53.

Week 7: Cultural Criticism (3): The Poetics of Power

I Henry IV

Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V’, in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 18–47.

Weeks 8–9: Ethical Criticism

I Henry IV

David Ruiter, ‘Harry’s (in)human face’, in Spiritual Shakespeares, ed. Ewan Fernie (London: Routledge, 2005).

Weeks 10–12: Re‐Humanising Shakespeare

King Lear

Extracts from Terry Eagleton, After Theory (London: Allen Lane, 2003).

Michael D. Bristol, ‘Humanist Interpretations’, in Shakespeare: an Oxford Guide, ed. Stanley Wells and Lena Cowen Orlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 333–43.