English 611—The British Imperial Imagination: 1492-1760

Christopher Hodgkins Office: McIver 116

Fall 2002 Office Hours: TTh 1:45-2:15; W 6-6:30

Wednesdays 6:30-9:20 pm and by appointment

McIver 324 Office Phone: 334-4691

cthodgki@uncg.edu Home Phone: 316-0463—before 10 pm

Required texts already on your shelf:

M. H. Abrams et al., eds., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, v. 1, 5-6-7^th edn.

The Bible

Required text at Copy Postal 1:

Hodgkins, English 611 Packet

Required texts at UNCG and Addams Bookstores:

Marvin Lunenfeld, 1492: Discovery, Invasion, Encounter (D. C. Heath)

Thomas More, Utopia (Penguin)

Richard Hakluyt, Voyages and Discoveries (Penguin)

William Shakespeare, The Tempest (Penguin), Cymbeline (Penguin)

John Milton, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained (Signet Classics)

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (Penguin)

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (Penguin)

Rudyard Kipling, The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories (Oxford)

Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust (Little, Brown)

Joseph Gibaldi, The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 5^th ed. (MLA)

Recommended texts at UNCG and Addams Bookstores:

Bartolomé de Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (Penguin)

Thomas Hariot, A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (Penguin)

Christopher Hodgkins, Reforming Empire: Protestant Colonialism and Conscience in British Literature (Missouri)

Seminar Goals

Students who successfully complete this seminar will master the assigned readings; think independently and originally about them; develop their abilities in scholarly oral presentation and collegial discussion; research, write, and rewrite an original and substantial interpretive paper that speaks to selected readings and themes of the course; and make specific and constructive suggestions about the papers of other students in a workshop setting.

Tentative Course Schedule of Primary Readings (specific pages assigned weekly)

Week 1 (8/21) Introduction: Imperium, Empire, Imperialism, Colonialism;

Virgil, Dante, Mandeville, DeBry, Gosson, Hariot

Week 2 (8/28) Kipling, “The Man Who Would Be King”; Packet—Geoffrey of

Monmouth

Week 3 (9/4) Lunenfeld, 1492

Week 4 (9/11) Lunenfeld; More, Utopia

Week 5 (9/18) Lunenfeld; More, Utopia; Packet—DeBry

Week 6 (9/25) Lunenfeld; Hakluyt, Voyages and Discoveries; Packet—Calvin,

Hakluyt, Dee, Las Casas, Spenser; Bible—Romans 1-3

Week 7 (10/2) Lunenfeld; Hakluyt, Voyages and Discoveries; Packet—Hariot,

Fletcher (Drake), Dee, Spenser; Bible—Acts 14

Week 8 (10/9) Hakluyt, Voyages and Discoveries; Packet—DeBry, Spenser, Virgil,

Hamor, Rolfe, Donne, Purchas; Norton: Donne, Drayton

Week 9 (10/16) Shakespeare, Cymbeline; Packet—Geoffrey of Monmouth, Stowe

Week 10 (10/23) Shakespeare, Cymbeline; Shakespeare, The Tempest; Packet—Strachy

(Purchas)

Prospectus for Seminar Paper: Due by Friday, October 25, 4 pm

Week 11 (10/30) Shakespeare, The Tempest; Hakluyt, Voyages and Discoveries;

Packet—Daniel, Herbert, Bourne, Las Casas; Milton, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained; Norton: Marvell

Week 12 (11/6) Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Packet--Defoe

Week 13 (11/13) Swift, Gulliver’s Travels; Packet—Swift, Johnson

Week 14 (11/20) Kipling, “The Judgment of Dungara”; Waugh, A Handful of Dust

Week 15 (11/27) No Class—Thanksgiving

Week 16 (12/4) Workshop Papers

Week 17 (12/11) Workshop Papers

Finals (12/18) Workshop Papers

Course Requirements

Attendance and Punctuality: Since this is a seminar, your careful preparation for and active participation in discussion are supremely important. Poor attendance, frequent tardiness, and unpreparedness will be viewed as evidence of your indifference. If you know that you’ll need to be excused from or late for a class, please contact me in advance.

Discussion Questions: Each week, you will write out and bring to class a couple of discussion questions, reactions, or comments to raise during our discussion of the assigned texts. These will be brief and informal (no longer than a paragraph each), and may be written longhand. They will be ungraded, but I will collect them and return them to you.

Oral Report: Due on your assigned report date. Once during the semester, you will give a 10- 15-minute oral report, in support of or in addition to that week’s assigned readings. (You will sign up for report dates and topics on August 28. See the list of suggested topics, or see me about one of your own.) Your report should 1) briefly review important scholarship or criticism on the topic; 2) take a tentative position of your own; and 3) be accompanied by a one-page handout photocopied for class distribution; the handout should include a simple outline of your remarks, and a selected bibliography for further reading. I recommend that you write out your remarks in full and time them, though I will not ask that you turn in the text of your remarks to me.

You’ll want to come talk with me early in the process about thinking through your report topic, researching it, and developing it into a worthwhile presentation.

Prospectus for Seminar Paper: Due by Friday, October 25, 4 pm. Provide me with a 1-2 page tentative summary of your seminar paper’s thesis, accompanied by an annotated bibliography—that is, a bibliography that comments briefly on the relevance of each cited work to your project. The bibliography should consist of at least 5 secondary sources and as many primary sources as you think necessary.

Seminar Paper Draft: Sufficient copies of complete draft due on Monday morning at 10:00 before the Wednesday evening on which your paper is discussed (see below). A complete draft of your approximately 15-page research essay will be read and discussed by our entire seminar group at an assigned date during the last 3 weeks of the semester. Your paper will develop an interpretive argument about one or more of the texts discussed in the course, or about a clearly related topic, and will incorporate primary and secondary materials that you’ve discovered in your library research—perhaps (but not necessarily) as an outgrowth of your oral report. By “primary sources” I mean literary or other textual sources that originated in the period(s) under study; by “secondary sources” I mean any critical, scholarly, or interpretive comment on those primary sources. However, despite the research emphasis here, the key word for this project is still essay. I am most interested in your interpretive ideas, and you should incorporate the fruits of research only as they are relevant to your thesis. Paper format must follow the MLA parenthetical style, using a Works Cited bibliography, as specified in the MLA Handbook.

As with your oral report, you’ll want to come talk with me early in the process about choosing a topic, researching it, and focusing your topic to a thesis. Again, the oral report may serve as a good warm-up for you.

Seminar Paper Draft Response: Due when a “respondee’s” seminar paper draft is discussed. I will assign each of you to give a detailed, constructive 5-minute opening oral response to a paper draft by one of your colleagues. You will accompany this response with a 1-2-page written listing of your items of praise and suggestions for improvement. The key words here are “detailed” and “constructive”—vague praise, or criticism without concrete suggestions for revision, both miss the mark because both are technically useless. What, specifically, are the draft’s strengths? How, particularly, might it be made better? Quote and cite page numbers.

Final Seminar Paper: Due one week after you receive your seminar paper draft back from me, and by December 23 at latest. A carefully revised version of your paper, accompanied by your seminar paper draft, incorporating what you’ve learned from my comments as well as from your colleagues’ comments and any further reading and research.

Late Papers: This being a seminar, late papers cause trouble for us all, especially to assigned paper respondents. Please make every effort to have sufficient copies of your seminar paper draft available by the Monday before your assigned discussion date. However, if you know that a difficulty is coming up and you’ll need more time, come see me well in advance.

Grading—Grades will be determined according to the following percentages:

Oral Report: 20%

Seminar Paper Prospectus: 15%

Seminar Paper Draft Response: 10%

Seminar Paper Draft and Final Seminar Paper: 55%

Plus or minus considerations of attendance and overall participation.

Possible Oral Report and Seminar Paper Topics (numbered approximately by week):

3.--Columbus’s motives

--Renaissance classicism and

The noble savage myth

The “translatio imperii” (transfer of empire) from Rome

--The Moors, the “Reconquista,” and the “White Legend” (la leyenda blanca) of Spain

--Spanish imperialism compared to

Roman imperialism

Islamic imperialism

Aztec imperialism

Inca imperialism

--Arawak religion

--Aztec religion

--Inca religion

4-5.--Sir Thomas More’s Utopia

and America

and anti-imperialism

and socialism

and Christian Humanism

and classicism

and the utopian tradition

as social satire

5.--Cortés’s conquest of Mexico

--Pizarro’s Conquest of Peru

--Gender and conquest

--Justifications of empire

--Las Casas

as Christian Humanist

as human rights activist

as propagandist

--Building Spain’s “Black Legend” (la leyenda negra)

6.--Reformation and empire

--Using Spain’s “Black Legend”

--Bible and imperialism/anti-imperialism

--Theodore DeBry

as Protestant anti-Spaniard

as engraver

as proto-/anti-imperialist

--Richard Hakluyt

as preacher

as spy

as archivist/editor

as imperial propagandist

--John Dee

as alchemist

as astrologer

as archivist

as imperial propagandist

as Merlin

7.--Myth of the imperial martyr

Sir Humphrey Gilbert & the

Squirrel

Sir Richard Grenville & the

Revenge

--The “White Legend” of Sir Francis Drake

--Circumnavigations compared

Ferdinand Magellan

Francis Drake

--Sir Walter Ralegh’s Lost Colony

and later myth

and Virginia (Jamestown)

and Virginia Dare

--Thomas Hariot

as scientist

as anthropologist

as colonial propagandist

--The Armada Year--1588

--Edmund Spenser

and the Reformation

and ancient Britain

and Ireland

and empire-building

8.--Ralegh in virgin Guiana

--John Donne

on gender and geography

and missionary imperialism

--Michael Drayton

the “Virginian Ode”

Poly-Olbion and ancient Britain

--Jamestown

as business enterprise

as military enterprise

as missionary enterprise

--Pocahontas

as nubile savage/Virgilian virgin

as royalty

as Christian convert

as “mother of us all”

9.--Empire on the Tudor-Stuart stage

Marlowe’s Tamburlaine

Shakespeare’s Roman Plays

Eastward Hoe & Westward Hoe

--Shakespeare’s Cymbeline

as tragicomedy/romance

and its sources

and Othello

and King Lear

and Roman Britain

and the birth of Christ

and the noble savage myth

10.--Shakespeare’s The Tempest

as tragicomedy/romance

and the noble savage myth

and Bermuda/Jamestown

and the Mediterranean

and Francis Drake

and John Dee

and Black Legend

and Cultural Materialism

11.--Samuel Purchas

and the Hakluyt tradition

as archivist/editor

as preacher

and missionary imperialism

and pilgrimage

--Samuel Daniel, George Herbert, and the westward course of empire

--The Puritan “errand into the wilderness”

--The origins of colonial racism

--Andrew Marvell

on “Bermudas”

on Oliver Cromwell

vs. Edmund Waller on Bermuda

--John Milton’s Paradise Lost

and Spain’s Black Legend

and the noble savage myth

and empire-building

according to David Quint

according to J. Martin Evans

--Paradise Regained

and Jesus as anti-imperialist

--Sir Francis Drake’s revived reputation

12.--Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe

and Alexander Selkirk

and technological colonialism

as exploration narrative

as conversion narrative

and religion

and the noble savage myth

13.--Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels

and Christian Humanism

and Ireland

and utopianism

as exploration narrative

as conversion narrative

as social satire

and the noble savage myth

and Tory anti-imperialism

and Swift’s insanity

--Samuel Johnson

and Tory anti-imperialism

14.--Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust

as Christian Humanist satire

and Protestant imperialism

as exploration narrative

and Ralegh’s El Dorado

and Arthurianism

and the noble savage myth

and Charles Dickens

and Joseph Conrad