Reading list for ENGL31122 Animals, Angels, Machines: Refiguring the Human 1600-1670

ENGL31122

2013/14 Spring Semester

READING LIST

Animals, Angels, Machines: Refiguring the Human 1600-1670

 

Excerpts will be provided in a course handbook available in week 0.

 

 

Week 1: introduction

 

Michel de Montaigne, An Apology for Raymond Sebond   [excerpt, handbook]

Edward Topsell, The History of Four-footed Beasts [excerpt, hb]

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things [excerpt, hb]

 

Week 2: Hamlet and the beast

 

William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Jacques Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I Am [excerpt, hb]

René Descartes, Discourse on the Method [excerpt, hb]

 

Week 3: cyborg Coriolanus

 

William Shakespeare, Coriolanus

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan [excerpt, hb]

Aristotle, Politics [excerpt, hb]

 

Week 4: bad weather, bad nature

 

William Shakespeare, King Lear

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus [excerpt, hb]

 

Week 5: spirits and monsters

 

William Shakespeare, The Tempest

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Theory [excerpt, hb]

 

Week 6 – READING WEEK

 

Week 7: art, artifice, animal disruptions

 

William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale

Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time [excerpt, hb]

 

 

 

Week 8: citizen fox: animals, power and the city

 

Ben Jonson, Volpone

Machiavelli, The Prince [excerpt]

 

Week 9: feminine machines and ‘that dead sea of life’

 

Ben Jonson, Epicoene

Selected popular sayings on women [hb]

Ben Jonson, selected poems [hb]

 

 

Week 10: Herbert’s animal transformations

 

George Herbert, The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. by Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) [selected poems]

 

Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus [excerpt]

 

 

Week 11: Donne’s telescope bodies

 

John Donne, John Donne’s Poetry, ed. by Donald R. Dickson (New York: Norton, 2007) [selected poems]

John Donne, Ignatius his Conclave and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions [excerpts, hb]

 

 

Week 12 Milton: angel sex and the fall

 

John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. by Gordon Teskey (New York: Norton, 2005) [long excerpt]

John Milton, Comus: A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle [excerpt]

 

 

 

 

 

Further Reading:

 

On animals:

 

Laurie Shannon, ‘The Eight Animals of Shakespeare’, PMLA 124.2 (2009), 472-479

 

Laurie Shannon, The Accomodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales       (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013)

 

Andreas Höfele, Stage, Stake and Scaffold: Humans and Animals in Shakespeare’s        Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)

 

Bruce Boehrer, Shakespeare among the Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama of             Early Modern England (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002)

 

Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert and Susan Wiseman, eds., At the Borders of the Human:     Beasts, Bodies and National Philosophy in the Early Modern Period    (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002)

 

Bruce Boehrer, A Cultural History of Animals in the Renaissance (London:       Bloomsbury Academic, 2011)

 

Brigitte Resl, A Cultural History of Animals in the Medieval Age (London: Bloomsbury            Academic, 2011)

 

Bruce Boehrer, Animal Characters: Non-human beings in Early Modern Literature     (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011)

 

 

On nature:

 

Man and the natural world: changing attitudes in England 1500-1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983)

 

Gabriel Egan, Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism (London and New             York: Routledge, 2006)

 

 

 

On machines:

 

Jonathan Sawday, Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of      the Machine (London: Routledge, 2007)

 

Adam Max Cohen, Shakespeare and Technology (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006)

 

Howard Marchitello, The Machine in the Text: Science and Literature in the Age of      Shakespeare and Galileo (Oxford: Oxford University, 2011)

 

Jessica Wolfe, Humanism, Machinery and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge:             Cambridge University Press, 2004)

 

 

On angels:

 

Katherine Hodgkin, ed, Reading the Early Modern Dream: The terrors of the Night      (London and New York: Routledge, 2008)

 

Joad Raymond, Milton’s Angels: The Early Modern Imagination (Oxford: Oxford         University, 2010)

 

Alexandra and Peter Marshall Walsham, Angels in the Early Modern World     (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2006)

 

Karma deGruy, ‘Desiring Angels: The Angelic Body in Paradise Lost’, Criticism, 51.12            (2012), 117-149

 

Laure Sangha, Angels and Belief in England, 1480-1700 (London: Pickering & Chatto 2012)

 

 

On the question of the human:

 

Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus, ‘What is a Posthumanist Reading?’ Angelaki 13.3 (2008), 95-111

 

Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009)

 

Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988)

 

Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus, Posthumanist Shakespeares (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2012)

 

Neil Badmington, ed., Posthumanism (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2000)

 

Neil Rhodes, ‘Hamlet and Humanism’ in Early Modern English Drama: A Companion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)

 

Eric P. Levy, Hamlet and the Rethinking of Man (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2008)

 

 

Further reading on early modern literature:

 

 

Mark Robson and James Loxley, Shakespeare, Jonson and the Claims of the Performative (London and New York: Routledge, 2013)

 

Julia Reinhard Lupton, Thinking With Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life (Chicago: Unviersity of Chicago Press, 2011)

 

Janette Dillon, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)

 

Alexander Leggatt, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s Comedies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)

 

 

Philippa Berry, Shakespeare’s Feminine Endings: Disfiguring Death in the Tragedies (London and New York: Routledge, 1999)

 

James Loxley, Ben Jonson (London and New York: Routledge, 2001)

 

Julie Sanders, ed, Jonson in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)

 

Alexander Leggatt, Ben Jonson: His Vision and His Art (London: Methuen, 1981)

 

 

Jonathan Goldberg, ‘The Dead Letter: Herbert’s Other Voices’ in Voice Terminal Echo (London: Methuen, 1986)

 

 

Michael Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship (Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 1991)

 

Achsah Guibbory, ed, The Cambridge Companion to Donne (Cambridge: Cambridge   University Press, 2006)

 

John Donne, John Donne’s Poetry: Authoritative texts, Criticism, ed. by Arthur             Clements (New York and London: Norton, 1992)

 

Dennis Richard Danielson, The Cambridge Companion to Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)

 

Catherine Belsey, John Milton: Language, Gender, Power (London: Basil Blackwell, 1988)