Why study the eighteenth century? To the unaccustomed reader, the period can seem to be all petticoats and pettifoggery. The prose clatters out in clumsy periods, the poetry proceeds in clockwork couplets. The thrill of studying the century, however, is that our most massively modern institutions come into being within its confines: the press, party politics, and the administrative state; the domestic family and the gender regime appropriate to it; and the advanced capitalist marketplace, the stock exchange, public credit, global trade, industrialization. So here's an interesting question: How does literature get entangled in such fundamental social changes? Is literature transformed by political, economic, and social changes? Does literature itself help bring such changes about? Our strategy will be to survey eighteenth-century Britain's characteristic literary modes, forms of writing that took shape or took on newfound significance between 1700 and 1800. In each case, we will begin by reading a well-known eighteenth-century text and then compare that text with an accomplished recent example from the same genre. Thus we will read Tory satire such as Jonathan Swift's madcap Tale of a Tub alongside Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, the Gothic novel such as Matthew Lewis's lurid Monk alongside Kubrick's Shining, and so on. This comparative perspective should help us get a handle on the eighteenth century in two ways: First, it will demonstrate that the eighteenth century was historically significant, because it changed the culture utterly. It changed what and how people read in ways that still affect us. But these similarities can be deceptive: The course should also help us articulate with greater precision everything that is particular to the eighteenth century. All the eighteenth-century genres we will be considering are still around, but all of them have changed substantially over time. None of them do the same cultural work today that they did 300 years ago. It will be our primary task, then, to determine as carefully as possible the many important ways in which eighteenth-century texts differ from their contemporary counterparts. Format: discussion/seminar. Requirements: one shorter, one longer paper, totaling about 15 pages, short weekly writing assignments, class attendance and participation. Prerequisites: a 100-level English course, except 150. Enrollment limit: 25 (expected: 25). (1700-1900)

THORNE