Module ENGL3A11: The Grubby Renaissance

Department: English Studies

ENGL3A11: The Grubby Renaissance

Prerequisites

• None

Corequisites

• None

Excluded Combination of Modules

• None

Aims

• To introduce students to cheap literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including new material forms such as the pamphlet, and unfamiliar genres such as the mock-prognostication.
• To encourage students to enhance their independent research skills and ability to engage with early modern texts through the use of databases including EEBO and EBBA.
• To enable students to have a detailed understanding of the historical and social contexts in which these texts are written.
• To improve students’ confidence with understanding, interpreting, and responding to early modern language.

Content

• Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cheap literature, including pamphlets, almanacs, mock prognostications, ballads, chapbooks.
• An overview of the developing role of the professional writer, including examinations of authorial persona, hack-writing, literary quarrels, and legacies.
• An introduction to the printing press, print culture, and the marketplace of print, including the contexts in which texts were bought and consumed.
• Students will be introduced to other contexts including early modern reading practices, popular print, early modern censorship, and criminality.

Learning Outcomes

• Students will learn to interpret paratextual material e.g. marginalia, images, title-pages as part of their critical engagement with early modern texts.
• Students will be introduced physical attributes of early modern texts using Durham special collections.
• Digital research skills will be enhanced through using digitised resources and databases e.g. EEBO and EBBA.
• Students will gain knowledge of early modern printing techniques and print culture.
• Students will gain further knowledge of early modern texts, their transmission, and readers.
• Students will gain an understanding of the importance of cheap print to the wider literary landscape.
• Students will learn about authorial identity and early celebrity.
• Students will appreciate different kinds of literature which are not written for posterity or fame, but which is vituperative, reactionary, and satirical.
• Students will learn about relevant social and historical contexts, including important events such as the Bishops’ Ban of 1599.
• Students will understand the implications of Elizabethan and Jacobean censorship on the literary landscape.

• Students studying this module will develop:
• Understanding of early modern language, neologism, and literary forms, and the ability to close read and respond to them with confidence.
• An ability to incorporate their understanding of the historical contexts into their interpretation and response to a text.
• Critical skills in the close reading and analysis of texts.
• An ability to demonstrate knowledge of a range of texts and critical approaches.
• Informed awareness of formal and aesthetic dimensions of literature and ability to offer cogent analysis of their workings in specific texts.
• Sensitivity to generic conventions and to the shaping effects on communication of historical circumstances, and to the affective power of language.
• An ability to articulate knowledge and understanding of concepts and theories relating to literary studies.
• Skills of effective communication and argument.
• Awareness of conventions of scholarly presentation, and bibliographic skills including accurate citation of sources and consistent use of scholarly conventions of presentation.
• Command of a broad range of vocabulary and an appropriate critical terminology.
• Awareness of literature as a medium through which values are affirmed and debated.

• Students studying this module will develop:
• A capacity to analyse critically.
• An ability to acquire complex information of diverse kinds in a structured and systematic way involving the use of distinctive interpretative skills derived from the subject.
• Competence in the planning and execution of assessed work.
• A capacity for independent thought and judgement, and ability to assess the critical ideas of others.
• Skills in critical reasoning.
• An ability to handle information and argument in a critical manner.
• Information-technology skills such as word-processing and electronic data access information.
• Organisation and time-management skills.

Modes of Teaching, Learning and Assessment and how these contribute to the learning outcomes of the module

• Seminars: encourage peer-group discussion, enable students to develop critical skills in the close reading and analysis of texts, and skills of effective communication and presentation; promote awareness of diversity of interpretation and methodology.
• Subject to access and availability, a session working with special collections will enable students to engage with early modern texts as material objects.
• Consultation session: encourages students to reflect critically and independently on their work.
• Independent but directed reading in preparation for seminars provides opportunity for students to enrich subject-specific knowledge and enhances their ability to develop appropriate subject-specific skills.
• Typically, directed learning may include assigning student(s) an issue, theme or topic that can be independently or collectively explored within a framework and/or with additional materials provided by the tutor.  This may function as preparatory work for presenting their ideas or findings (sometimes electronically) to their peers and tutor in the context of a seminar.
• Coursework: tests the student's ability to argue, respond and interpret, and to demonstrate subject-specific knowledge and skills such as appreciation of the power of imagination in literary creation and the close reading and analysis of texts; they also test the ability to present word-processed work, observing scholarly conventions. In individual Special Topics, the assessment may, where appropriate to the subject, take an alternative form, such as 'creative criticism'.
• Feedback: The written feedback that is provided after the first assessment allows students to reflect on examiners' comments, giving students the opportunity to improve their work for the second assessment.
• Essay 1 will be an essay responding to a particular theme studied on the course Essay 2 will take the form of a traditional critical essay in which students will respond to a quote or prompt using up to three texts studied on the course and secondary reading.

Teaching Methods and Learning Hours

Summative Assessment

Formative Assessment:

Before Essay 2, students have an individual 15 minute consultation session in which they are entitled to show their seminar leader a sheet of points relevant to the assessment and to receive oral comment on these points.

■ Students who do not attend monitored activities shown under Teaching Methods and Learning Hours, or who fail to complete the summative or formative assessment(s) specified above, may be subject to the Academic Progress procedures defined in the University's General Regulation V, and may be required to leave the University.