Queer Forms: Objects and Animals in Eighteenth-Century Poetry

ENGL31282 Queer Forms: Objects and Animals in Eighteenth-Century Poetry 20 Semester 2 Undergraduate Level 3 James Metcalf Unit coordinator English and American Studies 1 FHEQ level (Framework for Higher Education Qualifications) ' Last part of a Bachelors ' European Credit Transfer & Accumulation System Rating : 10.0 Formerly marginalised poems written by women and recovered by feminist critics have redrawn the map of eighteenth-century literature, enabling readers to discover new poetic subjects and original approaches to established forms and genres. This course will introduce students to eighteenth-century poetry through a range of works by women poets, including labouring-class and enslaved writers. We will also examine how poems by these writers are freshly relevant for new work in gender and sexuality studies, environmental humanities, and poetic form. Collectively, these critical fields reveal how eighteenth-century women poets used nonhuman subjects and innovative poetic strategies to radically reimagine the boundaries of the human and its normative categories of gender, sexuality, and race. From lapdogs, tankards, fossils, and stones to birds, flowers, insects, and atoms, poetic figures of the more-than-human world enabled eighteenth-century women poets – and enable us today – to re-envision both the limits and possibilities of human knowledge and representation. · explore a range of canonical and noncanonical poems written by women in Britain and America across the long eighteenth century;· use these texts to introduce students to eighteenth-century poetry – its history and development, its critical reception today (including legacies of feminist recovery), and some of its principal preoccupations across forms and genres;· examine this poetry’s renewed importance for the intersecting research fields of gender and sexuality studies, environmental humanities, and poetic form / formalism· build on critical skills and vocabularies developed in such courses as Theory and Text; Literature and History; Gender, Sexuality and the Body: Theories and Histories; Romanticism (1776-1832); and Satire and the Novel: English Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century. -Confidently engage with work in eighteenth-century poetry, from feminist recoveries of poems by women to the enduring significance of these texts for research in gender and sexuality studies, environmental humanities, and poetic form / formalism  -Demonstrate understanding of cultural contexts for eighteenth-century poetry, including debates about gender and sexuality, the body and its aesthetic representation, class and race, objects and animals, and the construction of the canon  -Display aptitude for writing critically about poems from a range of theoretically informed perspectives -Analyse how encounters with the nonhuman in eighteenth-century women’s poetry generate opportunities to think beyond the limits of the human and its normative categories  -Discuss how this project of revising existing orders of knowledge and representation can be read in new ways through queer, gender, and critical race, and environmental studies   -Demonstrate proficiency with critical and theoretical vocabularies from studies in poetics, gender and sexuality, race, and environmental humanities -Sustain a sophisticated scholarly argument focusing on how and why poetry is especially adept at facilitating these explorations, engaging with current ideas about form / formalism  -Sharpen skills in close reading  -Independently develop concepts and critical practices in an assessed portfolio of close readings of poems and an essay, informed by critical theory from the course -Close reading and textual analysis -Argumentation and criticality: the construction of clear, rigorous, and detailed critical writing -Interpersonal and presentation skills in posing and defending perspectives to a group Analytical skills Group/team working Oral communication Written communication 1 x 1hour Lecture and 1 x 2 hour seminar 2 Written assignment (inc essay) 60% 5 Portfolio 40%  <figure class="table"><table class="MsoNormalTable" style="border-collapse:collapse;margin-left:5.25pt;mso-padding-alt:0cm 0cm 0cm 0cm;mso-yfti-tbllook:1184;width:445.25pt;" border="1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="594"><tbody><tr style="height:15.0pt;mso-yfti-firstrow:yes;mso-yfti-irow:0;"><td style="border:1.0pt solid windowtext;height:15.0pt;mso-border-alt:solid windowtext .75pt;padding:0cm;vertical-align:top;width:216.55pt;" width="289"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;mso-bidi-font-family:Calibri;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-fareast-language:EN-GB;mso-font-kerning:0pt;mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;mso-ligatures:none;" lang="EN-US">Feedback method  <span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;mso-bidi-font-family:Calibri;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-fareast-language:EN-GB;mso-font-kerning:0pt;mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;mso-ligatures:none;"> </td><td style="border-bottom-style:solid;border-color:windowtext;border-left-style:none;border-right-style:solid;border-top-style:solid;border-width:1.0pt;height:15.0pt;mso-border-alt:solid windowtext .75pt;mso-border-left-alt:solid windowtext .75pt;padding:0cm;vertical-align:top;width:228.7pt;" width="305"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;mso-bidi-font-family:Calibri;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-fareast-language:EN-GB;mso-font-kerning:0pt;mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;mso-ligatures:none;" lang="EN-US">Formative or Summative <span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;mso-bidi-font-family:Calibri;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-fareast-language:EN-GB;mso-font-kerning:0pt;mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;mso-ligatures:none;"> </td></tr><tr style="height:15.0pt;mso-yfti-irow:1;"><td style="border-bottom-style:solid;border-color:windowtext;border-left-style:solid;border-right-style:solid;border-top-style:none;border-width:1.0pt;height:15.0pt;mso-border-alt:solid windowtext .75pt;mso-border-top-alt:solid windowtext .75pt;padding:0cm;vertical-align:top;width:216.55pt;" width="289"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;mso-bidi-font-family:Calibri;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-fareast-language:EN-GB;mso-font-kerning:0pt;mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;mso-ligatures:none;" lang="EN-US"> Written Feedback<span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;mso-bidi-font-family:Calibri;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-fareast-language:EN-GB;mso-font-kerning:0pt;mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;mso-ligatures:none;"> </td><td style="border-bottom:1.0pt solid windowtext;border-left-style:none;border-right:1.0pt solid windowtext;border-top-style:none;height:15.0pt;mso-border-alt:solid windowtext .75pt;mso-border-left-alt:solid windowtext .75pt;mso-border-top-alt:solid windowtext .75pt;padding:0cm;vertical-align:top;width:228.7pt;" width="305">Summative</td></tr></tbody></table></figure>   N Indicative primary reading: poetry by Anne Finch, Jane Holt, Elizabeth Thomas, Mary Leapor, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Phillis Wheatley Peters, Ann Yearsley, Charlotte Smith, Felicia Hemans, and others.Selected Course Preparatory Reading:  · Kadji Amin, Amber Jamilla Musser, and Roy Pérez (eds), ‘Queer Form: Aesthetics, Race, and the Violences of the Social’, ASAP/Journal 2, no. 2 (2017)  · Paula R. Backscheider, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre (Johns Hopkins, 2005)  · Brycchan Carey, Sayre Greenfield, and Anne Milne (eds), Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Reason, Emotion, and Ornithology, 1700–1840 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)  · Mel Y. Chen and Dana Luciano (eds), ‘Queer Inhumanisms’ special issue, GLQ 21, nos. 2–3 (2015)  · Jeremy Chow (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Environmental Humanities (Bucknell, 2022)  · Ramzi Fawaz, Queer Forms (NYU, 2022)  · Lynn Festa, Fiction Without Humanity: Person, Animal, Thing in Early Enlightenment Literature and Culture (Pennsylvania, 2019)  · Jack Halberstam, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (Duke, 2020)  · Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (NYU, 2020)  · Heather Keenleyside, Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century (Pennsylvania, 2016)  · Lisa L. Moore, Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes (Minnesota, 2011)  · Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Duke, 2014) Lectures 11 Seminars 22 0 0