ENG 2098 Renaissance Poetry
This course is designed to introduce students to the specialized study of Renaissance poetry, focusing specifically on how the Renaissance used poetry to think through questions about free will. Calvinism and the English Church adopted the principle of predestination, the idea that God chose who was saved and who was damned when he created the universe. This idea led to intense cultural anxiety over the existence of free will and the value of self-reliance and self-cultivation. This course will examine how the Renaissance used the literary language that it inherited from Rome, a culture that valued self-reliance, to think through questions about the relationship of the self to God. In addition to reading Renaissance poetry, students will become familiar with Protestant philosophy. We will read the work of Martin Luther, Erasmus, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, and John Milton. The course culminates with a sustained study of Milton's Paradise Lost. Students will learn how to analyze rhetorical and poetic devices, how to use the religious and philosophical cultural context to historically situate poetry, and how to write an effective analytical paper about poetry, in general, and early modern poetry, in particular.
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