ENGLISH 229S: Edmund Spenser and the Art of Theory

Graduate Seminar

Fall 2024

English 229s
Edmund Spenser and the Art of Theory

Mondays 3:45-5:45pm

Barker 269

Professor Gordon Teskey

Department of English, Harvard University
Email: gteskey@fas.harvard.edu
Office Hours: Tuesdays 2-4pm and by appointment

Course Description

A seminar on the poetry of Spenser and the art of the practice of theory. In contrast to Milton, Spenser thinks as he writes and also lets the poem think for him. He does not think with poetry but through it. One consequence, seldom drawn by critics of Spenser, is that the kind of poem he writes—an allegory—invites us to think along with it as well, in our own terms. Alongside the poems, especially The Faerie Queene, we will read works of important theorists from the postwar period to the present day and see how scholars of Spenser brings The Faerie Queene into conversations with them. The theoretical approaches discussed in this seminar include structuralism; deconstructionism; theories of allegory; field theory; New Hegelianism; feminist and queer theories; new materialism; and theories of the post-human.

Texts

The Shorter Poems. Ed. Richard McCabe. London: Penguin, 1999.
The Faerie Queene. Ed. A. C. Hamilton. Textual editors Hiroshi Yamashita and Toshiyuki Suzuki. Harlow, England: Longman, 2001.

Edmund Spenser’s Poetry, Fourth Edition. New York: Norton, 2013.

Other books, book chapters, and articles will also be included.