EN35420

Module Identifier	EN35420
Module Title	EARLY MODERN IDENTITIES
Academic Year	2000/2001
Co-ordinator	Dr Claire Jowitt
Semester	Semester 1
Course delivery	Seminar	20 Hours 10 x 2 hrs
Assessment	Continuous assessment	2 essays (2,500 words each)	100%
	Resit assessment	Resubmit any failed elements and/or make good any missing elements.

Brief description
A contral concern of this module is to question concepts of Early Modern Identities. Notions of fixed or pre-given identities are challenged as they are figured in discourses of colonial exploration, 'race', religion, gender and sexuality. By focusing on questions of power, and representations of 'Self' and 'Other' within an early modern historical context, it is aimed to expose and explore the way in which these identities are constructed. Students will be introduced to a wide variety of texts including film, drama, pamphlet debastes, voyage narratives, autobiographies and philosophical treatises.

Outline syllabus

Whose Life is it Anyway? Identity on Trial. Text: The Return of Martin Guerre (film, 1982)
Splitting Images: Early Modern Bodies. Texts: Rene Descartes, Discourse Upon Method and the Mediations (1637) (Penguin, 1968); John Donne, "The Extasie" (any edition); Andrew Marvell, "A Dialogue Between Soul and Body" (any edition)
Colonial/Colonized Identities
Background, Colonial Identity and Competition for Empire. Texts: Bartolome de Las Casas, Digest of Columbus's Log Book of his First Voyage; Christopher Columbus, Letters of Columbus to Various Persons Describing the Results of his First Voyage and Written on the Return Journey from J.M. Cohen (ed.) The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Penguin, 1969)
Colonized Identity. Text: Aphra Behn, Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave (1688) (Norton 1980)
Constructing Others: 'Race' and Sexuality. Text: William Shakespeare, Othello (1604) (any edition)
Performing Gender: Transvestites and Transgression
Text: William Shakespeare: Twelfth Night (1602) (any edition)
Text: Hic Mulier: Or the Man-Woman and Haec Vir: Or the Womanish Man (1620) (xerox)
Dangerous Liaisons: Same Sex Desire in Early Modern England. Text: Christopher Marlowe, Edward II (1594) (any edition); [note: a showing of Derek Jarman's film Edward II (1991) will be arranged]
Writing Identities
Spiritual Autobiography and the Inner Self. Texts: John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666) (any edition)
The Enabling Female Imagination? Texts: Margaret Cavendish, A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding and Life (1656) in Elspeth Graham (ed.) Her Own Life (Routledge, 1989) (some xerox copies will be available); Cavendish, The Blazing World (1666) in Paul Salzman (ed.) An Anthology of Seventeenth Century Fiction (OUP, 1991)

Bibliography
Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body (Methuen, 1984)
Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn (eds.), Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in Renaissance Culture 1540-1660 (Reaktion Books, 1990)
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality vol 1 (Penguin, 1976)
Stephen Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions, The Wonder of the New World, (Clarendon, 1991)
Peter Stallybrass (ed.), Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (Routledge, 1991)
Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage (Penguin, 1979)