Prof. Robert Matz
Office Hours: TW 10:30-11:30, R 7:20-8:20, and by appointment
Office: Robinson A422
Email: rmatz@gmu.edu
Office Ph. #: 703-993-1169
home page: http://mason.gmu.edu/~rmatz 

Required texts:
Sixteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, ed. Braden (Blackwell Publishing)
Shakespeare's Poems, ed. Bevington (Bantam)
Essays and supplementary poetry/prose available on line or through electronic course reserve (ECR). (Click here for ECR or go to the library home page at http://library.gmu.edu and find the link for E-Reserves under the "Library Quick Links" pull down menu. You'll also need a password, which I'll give you in class. A fast connection is recommended.)

Note: Please print out all electronically available material; read it in hard copy and bring that hard copy to class. (If you'd like to buy an actual copy of Sidney's Defence or Spenser's Shepherdes Calender, etc., please see me.) Since there will be a large volume of printed material for this class, you may find it convenient to buy a binder or separate folder to organize it.

Course Description:
Love is not only the frequent subject of the most often read poetry of the sixteenth century, it also offers an amazingly flexible and rich vocabulary to raise a range of cultural, political and literary questions. Why, for example, might love have been seen in the Renaissance as a natural subject for poetry? Did this love poetry reflect the patriarchal assumptions of the period, or challenge them, or both? What were the relationships between "courtship" and the Tudor court? What kinds of love does this poetry encompass, and how do they relate? We'll look at these and other questions in the course of an advanced introduction to sixteenth-century English poetry. We'll also take a peek at the legacy of this poetry and the changes it undergoes in seventeenth-century England. Addtionally, we'll read critical work from a variety of approaches, though with an emphasis on historicist and feminist criticism.

Course requirements: Class participation, weekly reading responses, a presentation, a close reading (5-7 pp.), a prospectus (1p.) an annotated biliography and a final paper (15-20 pp.)

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Schedule of readings and events:
Note: this schedule is subject to change (I will give warning, however).

Course Introduction

*John Skelton: "Against a Comely Custron"; from "Diverse Ballads and Ditties Solacious"; "The Ancient Acquaintance"; "Bouge of Court" (on-line)
*Thomas Wyatt: "What Vaileth Truth"; "The Long Love"; "Whose List to Hunt"; "Each Man Me Telleth"; "Farewell Love"; "It May Be Good"; "My Galley"; "Madam, Withouten Many Words"; "Answer"; "Ye Old Mule"; "They Flee From Me" (both versions); "Sometime I Fled the Fire"; "My Lute Awake"; "Unstable Dream"; "You That in Love"; "Tagus Farewell"; "Mine Own John Poins"; "Blame Not My Lute"; "The Pillar is Perished"; "Stand Whoso List"
*Earl of Surrey: pp. 66-68; 71-74; 77-76

Readings:
Norbert Elias, "The Courtization of Warriors" from The Civilizing Process (Blackwell, 2000) (ECR); Joan Kelly, "Did Women Have a Renaissance"? from The Essays of Joan Kely: Women, History and Theory (U. Chicago, 1984) (ECR)

Spenser: Shepherdes Calender, "January"; "February"; "April"; "October" (on line)
Sidney: Defense of Poetry (on line)
Puttenham: from "The Arte of English Poesie," section 3.1 and section 3.1(on line)
Gosson: from "The Schoole of Abuse" (on line)

Readings: Louis Montrose, "'The perfecte paterne of a Poete': The Poetics of Courtship in The Shepheardes Calender" Texas Studies in Literature and Language: A Journal of the Humanities 21 (1979): 34-67 (ECR); Frances Dolan, "Taking the Pencil Out of God's Hand: Art, Nature, and the Face-Painting Debate in Early Modern England" PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 108 (1993): 224-39 (on line)

*Gascoigne: "Gascoigne's Lullaby"; "In Haste Post-Haste"; "Gascoigne's Woodmanship"
*Googe and Turberville: pp. 133-135
*Sidney: Sonnets, 1-9, 13, 15, 18, 19, 21, 22, 27, 28, 29, 31, 34, 37, 41, 45, 49, 52, 58, 60, 63, 64, 69, 71-74, 81-83, "Fourth Song, 86, "Fifth Song," "Eight Song," 106-108

Readings: From Yvor Winters, "The 16th Century Lyric in England: A Critical and Historical Reinterpretation" in Elizabethan Poetry ed. Paul Alpers (Oxford, 1967), 93-106 (ECR); From C.S. Lewis "English Literature of the Sixteeenth Century (Oxford, 1954), 64-65 (ECR); Catherine Bates, "Astrophil and the Manic Wit of the Abject Male" SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 41 (2001): 1-24

*Daniel: sonnets, 1-6; 11-12; 36-39, 45, 49, 50
*Spenser: from Amoretti (322-326); *Drayton: from Idea's Mirror and Idea (484-86);*Fulke Greville: 12, 38, 40, 56;*Sir John Davies (513); *Barnabe Barnes (514); *Richard Barnfield (550-551); *Whitney, "To Her Unconstant Lover"; *Marlowe: "Passionate Shepherd"; *Ralegh: "The Nymph's Reply"; "Our Passions"; "Nature, That Washed"; "A Sonnet"; *Queen Elizabeth, "An Answer"

Readings: Arthur Marotti, "'Love Is Not Love': Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order" ELH 49 (1982): 396-428 (on line); Ilona Bell, Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 60-74 (ECR)

Spenser, FQ, Book 3, Proem and Cantos 1-6

Reading: Knapp, Jeffrey Knapp, from An Empire Nowhere: England, America and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest, 134-41 and 151-74 (ECR)

Close reading essay due
Annotated bibliography assigned

Spenser, FQ, Book 3, Cantos 7-12

Reading: Bruce Boehrer, "'Carelesse Modestee': Chastity as Politics in Book 3 of the Faerie Queene," ELH 55 (1988): 555-573. (on line)

*Marlowe: "Hero and Leander"
*Shakespeare: "Venus and Adonis"
*Nashe: "Choice of Valentines" (on line)

Readings: Georgia Brown, Redefining Elizabethan Literature (Cambridge, 2005), 134-44 (ECR); Catherine Belsey, "Love as Trompe-l'oeil: Taxonomies of Desire in 'Venus and Adonis,'" Shakespeare Quarterly 46 (1995): 257-276 (on line)

Conferences

Donne, all the Elegies and Songs and Sonnets (not the Satires)

Readings: Rebecca Bach, "(Re)Placing John Donne in the History of Sexuality," ELH 72 (2005): 259-89 (on line--Note: Follow link from ELH table of contents page; find essay on that page and click on .pdf file for best option); Richard Halpern, "The Lyric in the Field of Information: Autopoiesis and History in Donne's Songs and Sonnets" in John Donne: Contemporary Critical Essays, New Casebook, Andrew Mousley (St. Martin's, 1999) (ECR)

Shakespeare's Sonnets

Reading: Eve Sedgwick, "Swan in Love: The Example of Shakespeare's Sonnets," Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (Columbia UP, 1985). (ECR)

The new century: (all ECR)

Jonson, "Charis"; "Still to Be Neat"
Wroth, from Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, 14, 15, 22, 23, 35, 46, 48
Herrick, "The Vine" "Delight in Disorder"; "The Lily in the Crystal"; "Strawberries and Cream"; "Upon Julia's Clothes"
Herbert "Prayer (1)"; "Jordan (1)"; "Jordan (2)" "The Collar"; "The Pulley"
Marvell: "To His Coy Mistress," "The Garden," "The Mower Against Gardens"; "The Coronet"
Milton, from Paradie Lost, book 4, ll 689-814

New Century cont./Wrap up/Snow Day

Other important dates

Sept. 13:	Last day to drop a course with no tuition liability (for full semester courses)
Sept. 13:	Last day to add a course
Sept. 30:	Last day to drop a course (for full semester courses)

Course Policies:

Readings:
The readings for each class are due on the date listed above. Approach each assignment actively by always reading with a pen or pencil in hand. Note words, phrases or sentences that interest you, that seem significant in the context of the work, or that you have questions about. Jot down in the margins any questions or ideas you have about a particular point or the work as a whole. This practice will help you come prepared to discuss the readings in class and get the most out of class discussion; it will also help you become a more skillful reader of literary texts in general.

Participation and Attendance:
I may occasionally lecture for a portion of a class, but we will also open up class time to discussion, to observations about the ideas presented in a text, about its style, its uses of language, its puzzling qualities--whatever grabs our attention. I am interested in your ideas. Students are expected to attend each session of class and to participate in class discussion. Attendance and class discussion will be a portion of your overall "participation" grade.

Reading Responses:
The reading responses are meant to help you read carefully, to prepare for class discussion and to aid you in finding starting points for your essays. A reading response should consider some aspect (or at most two aspects) of the day's reading that is not answerable by a fact. It should be at least one page (and not longer than two), typed. You might also consider the critical reading for the day, perhaps agreeing or disagreeing with it, or applying its argument to some other point in the literary reading for the day. Reading responses will receive credit if they meet the criteria above and are turned in at the end of class. Your overall reading responses grade will be determined by the number of no credits, i.e. times you missed being in class with a response, on the following scale. 1 = A; 2-3 = B; 4 = C; 5 = D; 6 or more = F. This grade will be a portion of your "participation" grade.

Presentation:
As a character in Joyce's Ulysses remarks about sixteenth-century England, "life ran high in those days." Many of the writers we are reading did have dramatic lives, well worth retelling, and in every case knowledge of these writers lives will help us to understand their work. To that end, I would like each of you to briefly present (five to ten minutes would be fine) on the life of one of the writers we are reading. When you do so, you do not need--and should not!--provide a chronology of the writer's life. A few factoids to orient us are fine, but don't try to cover every biographical detail or event, especially with no sense of priority. Instead, decide on one or two events in the life you'd really like to emphasize, and consider how those events would relate to the work we are reading. For this presentation no extensive research is required. You can start with the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (available on line through theGMU library database page) and perhaps follow up a particular event or biographical detail that interests you in a biography or literary biography.

Paper Deadlines:
Please hand in assignments in on time. Late assignments will be graded down a half grade for each day late. I'll grade the term paper based on the final version only, but I will mark it down a half grade if a complete first version is not ready for the paper exchange on Dec. 1.

Papers:
Papers should be typed with standard margins, spacing and type size. They should be carefully proofread and neatly presented. The assignments are intended to help you work step by step toward a final term paper.

• The first paper should be about five to seven pages and provide a close reading of some moment or a set of related moments in one of the plays. It is due on October 6.

• The 1-page prospectus should give a synopsis of the idea you want to explore in your final paper, as well as questions that remained to be answered, and/or speculation about further directions to develop the topic. The prospectus should be based on your close reading and the on-going work you are doing on the annotated bibliography. The prospectus is due October 20. The following week there will be no class. Instead, we will discuss your prospectus in scheduled conferences.

• The annotated bibliography will be a list of about 15 critical, historical, literary or theoretical sources relevant to the play that you are working on. They should also particularly focus on helping you develop ideas discussed in your close reading. Work on the prospectus and the annotated bibliography overlap and, ideally, will mutually inform one another. The annotated bibliography is due on November 3.

• A 15-page first version of your term paper will be due in class on December 1. This class will be devoted to sharing work with other students. You are also invited to see me at my office with your first version of the paper.

• Following the paper workshop, you will have time further to develop and revise your work, based on the suggestions you have received from your peer reviewer, on your own interests or discussion with me. Final papers are due in class on December 8.

Please note: I encourage you to write about any primary text on the syllabus. If you have an idea about what you'd like to write about, you might want to see me for help figuring out what text would be appropriate for your topic.

Paper Helps:
Some feedback from me and other students will be built into the structure of the course. I encourage you, however, to see me at my office at any time. When we meet, it's best to have a draft of the paper you are working on. This will give us something more concrete to talk about. There is also available a Writing Center at Robinson A116 that can provide you with further individual attention to your writing. I encourage you to take advantage of this excellent facility.

I would also suggest that you give yourself plenty of time to work. Writing a paper at one sitting is, for most people, unpleasant, and the results are not likely to be satisfactory. Start early!

Plagiarism:
You must cite, using a standard citation format, all the articles, books or other sources that your own writing draws on, either directly or indirectly. Such sources include (but are not limited to) introductions to editions of the texts we're reading, any kind study aid and resources found on the internet.

Also note that uncited sources will constitute plagiarism even if they ended up in your work without your conscious knowledge (e.g. you forgot you read the material; you confused your own notes with notes on a source), since part of the scholarly responsibility that comes with using secondary sources is keeping track of which words or ideas were yours and which came from a source.

I will take all suspected cases of plagiarism to the Honor Committee.

Grades will be derived as follows:

First paper:	15 %
Participation = attendance, reading notes, class discussion, presentation, and prospectus, all weighted about equally	20%
Annotated Bibliography:	20%
Final paper:	45%

Please come see me if you have any questions about grading, the syllabus or the class. I look forward to having the chance to meet you. Best wishes for a good semester!

B Specific thesis, thesis generally developed through the course of the paper, consistently good interpretation of text, competent prose, minor mechanical problems

C Has a thesis, but one that needs greater specificity or complexity, thesis developed with some digression or repetition, some good interpretation, some mechanical problems

D Very general thesis, thesis development digressive or repetitive, plot summary or thoughts/speculations not based on textual evidence, major mechanical problems

F No thesis or thesis development

ADDITIONAL CRITERIA FOR RESEARCH IN TERM PAPER

A Paper astutely frames and develops or critiques current critical discussion of its topic. Paper includes a range of top relevant critical, historical and/or theoretical analyses to support its points

B Paper includes current critical discussion of its topic. Paper contains a range of relevant critical, historical and/or theoretical analyses to support its points

C Paper includes critical discussion of its topic but its own argument does not clearly relate to that discussion. Secondary sources in the paper are of low quality and/or lead to digression from the paper's focus rather than supporting it.

D Few secondary sources; secondary sources not relevant to the argument of the paper

F No secondary sources