Portrait of Clara (as a chemist)
3 weeks ago
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Faerie Queene, anyone?
Reading Flavia's post of 2/11 inspired me to start thinking in advance, about a course I'm teaching next year. I've proposed a graduate seminar on the Faerie Queene (though, ultimately, we will take in much of Spenser, I suspect). I decided to teach this course in part because it always bothers me that undergrad courses tend to cover only Book One (perhaps, as a poet, I'm insulted on Spenser's behalf), and in part because it's absolutely not my area of specialization and I felt I needed to shore up my own understanding of Spenser's place in Ren lit. But I'm going to need to incorporate some readings in criticism, and there...I get a little haphazard. I'm hoping that wiser folk will be able to direct me to texts that I must look at, either for my own edification or for inclusion in the syllabus. What are the seminal articles on FQ? or Spenser generally?
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4 comments:
Okay, I am Not A Spenserian, but I'm jealous as all hell of this class of yours.
One essay that is decidedly non-seminal, but that I always find productive at least to refer to, is Camille Paglia's from Sexual Personae. It's mostly about Book 3, and I'm assigning it this term, when I'm teaching 3 & 4 in my upper-division class--but even when I teach Book 1 I always throw some of its central arguments at my students. For instance, Paglia claims that FQ is "a catalogue of sexual perversions," and "its best moments are pornographic."
Wakes them up, anyway.
Oh, and if you haven't decided on a text yet, I'm using the individual volumes put out by Hackett, for the first time, and so far am pretty impressed--they're very handsome volumes, very readable, and with clear, useful, student-friendly notes & introductions.
The Longman edition's notes can't be matched, of course, and it's probably best for a grad seminar. . . but it's such a textually ugly thing, and so awkward to lug around. You might want to at least look into some free examination copies from Hackettt while you're prepping!
Thanks, Flavia. I'll probably end up with the Longman, because it's got all my grad school notes in it and I can't bear to begin with a blank slate. (I was learning from really smart folk in grad school.) But I'll totally get on the Hackett gravy train, and I'm delighted to learn about Paglia, which (I'm ashamed to admit) I don't remember ever having read before....
The Greenblatt chapter in Renaissance Self-Fashioning has proven pretty seminal, as much scholarship focuses on Spenser-and-Ireland now.
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