Practices of Early Modern Writing

Catalog description

Writing has lately been described as a skilled "technique of the self" (Foucault), as a linchpin of the modern scientific enterprise (Shapin and Schaffer), and as a "mnemotechnic" that may well be a new site of psychopower (Stiegler). The latter thinker, in bringing Platonic warnings about writing in dialogue with more contemporary technologies, is far from alone in the concern he articulates over the increased capacity to know (in his terms, "savoir") at the expense of capacities to know "how to do" and "how to live" (roughly, savoir-faire and savoir-vivre). The early modern readings of this course aim to open up these questions of savoir-faire in particular, considering practices that may include essay writing (Bacon, Locke, Haywood), the humanist exercises of progymnasmata (Aesop's Fables), lyric poetry (Wyatt, Herbert, Marvell), learned textual commentary and political counsel (Shakespeare, Sidney), devotional world-building (Milton, Bunyan, Hutchinson), life-writing and the novel (Defoe, Richardson, Sterne). Depending on participant interest, assigned readings may include twenty-first century studies that produce lenses at once retrospective and future-oriented to ask - what, after all, are the defining methods, techniques, or practices of our discipline?