ENGL 315 - Thinking With Renaissance Literature

FC ARHU WINT

4 credits
How do we know what we know? What are the limits of knowledge? Can we hold contradictory thoughts simultaneously? The Renaissance was poised between magic and science, humanism and induction, dream vision and empiricism, credulity and skepticism. Reading Shakespeare, Marlowe, More, Milton, Montaigne, Descartes, Erasmus, Spenser, Cavendish, Bacon, and Pulter, we will engage in weekly “thought experiments”: keeping commonplace books, writing poetry and fiction, making art, doing research, writing bibliographies, recording dreams, directing, meditating, analoging. Throughout, we will examine literature’s proximity to both knowledge and selfhood, and consider what it really means to say “I think, therefore I am.”

Prerequisites: Two 200-level ENGL courses.