Katherine Horgan

Open, Seminar—Spring

LITR 3198

Sappho has been famous for a very long time: born in the sixth century BCE (a couple hundred years after Homer), Sappho has been considered one of the greatest poets of the western canon for millennia, a writer whose poetry has influenced authors from Plato to Anne Carson. Sappho’s fame was such that it outlived even her poems: today, Sappho’s poetry survives only in 600 fragments, with only one complete poem remaining. This course will consider the reception of Sappho—as both a literary character and a corpus of poetry—over 2,600 years. Beginning with the composition of her poems, we will discuss the possible contexts of their creation, their critical reception, and their thematic material. We will also explore the formation of Sappho as a character, in plays, poems, and testimonia and her simultaneous characterization as the Tenth Muse, the gender-bending personification of queer erotic desire, and the self-destroying victim of cultural forces. As we chart the intertwined reception of both poems and character over two millennia—through Plato, Menander, Catullus, Horace, Boccaccio, Sidney, Donne, Katherine Philips, Swinburne, H.D., Woolf, Mary Barnard, Anne Carson, and many others—students will become familiar with the larger currents of Sappho’s long afterlife. We will gain experience applying a variety of theories and methodologies, including lyric theory, historicism, queer theory and historiography, book history, feminist theory, and reception theory. Through our reading, we will come to understand that the only question more interesting than who Sappho was is the question of what she has meant to people over time and what about her poetry, persona, and potential has kept us going back to her for more than 20 centuries.

Faculty

Katherine Horgan

Open, Lecture—Fall

LITR 2101

Without the literature of classical antiquity, William Shakespeare would not—and could not—have written some of his most beloved plays: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, The Comedy of Errors, and The Tempest—not to mention his two longer poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece—all owe much of their plot, style, form, and content to authors such as Ovid, Virgil, Plautus, and Lucan. This course will explore Shakespeare’s relationship with the literature of ancient Greece and Rome and the opportunities that literature afforded him for exploring ideas of gender, sexuality, politics, race, class, and the connection between past and present. Reading works like Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the plays of Plautus and Terence alongside Shakespeare’s plays and poems, students will explore the formation of literary canon and tradition, gain familiarity with some major works of classical antiquity, and discover Shakespeare’s complex, innovative approach to the authors who shaped his education and literary milieu. In your work for this course, students will chart Shakespeare’s transformation of classical works, learn to engage with and evaluate early modern printed books, and master not only Shakespeare’s English, but the ancient source material from which his most compelling drama springs. As we discuss Shakespeare’s relationship to his classical counterparts, we will gain a new understanding of the ways Shakespeare’s use of literature of the past came to define the social, sexual, and political structures of our present.

Faculty

Katherine Horgan

Open, Seminar—Fall

LITR 3017

Virginia Woolf was a novelist of the future: a hyper-modern literary innovator, a pioneer of psychological forms, a theorist of gender and sexuality, and champion of women’s literary progress whose radical vision revolutionized literature of the 20th century. Woolf’s thinking about the future, however, was grounded in an equally robust fascination with the past. Throughout her fiction and nonfiction writing, Woolf articulates an insatiable need for history’s stabilizing, guiding, and authorizing power—a history that she, and queer women authors at large—often lacked. This course will explore Virginia Woolf’s career-long mission to write the history she—and women writers at large—needed to support her literary endeavors. We will examine how Woolf made and remade literary history for herself in works of criticism, such as the first and second Common Readers, and in novels such as To the Lighthouse, Orlando, A Room of One’s Own, and Between the Acts. Charting Woolf’s idea of literature from antiquity, through the Middle Ages and early modernity, to the 20th century, we will read Woolf’s criticism alongside excerpts from the historical texts that inspired it, such as Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Sappho’s fragments, Dickens’ David Copperfield and Brontë’s Jane Eyre. We will chart the ways Woolf assembles female characters and authors from literature of the past and attend to the ways her fictions both attempt to fill the gendered gaps of history and move marginalized figures to the center of literary conversations. Students will become familiar with feminist, queer theoretical, new-historical, and post-colonial approaches to Woolf’s work as we discuss issues of canonicity, reception, gender, sexuality, and authorship. Throughout the course, we will think through the ways other marginalized peoples—especially queer people, trans people, and people of color—have struggled to restore their own buried histories, and the ways in which Woolf’s methods might aid, hinder, damage, and support these ongoing projects. As Woolf well knew, one needs a past to imagine a future: in this course we will take the real lessons Woolf gives us in recovering pasts to create a history that is lively, reparative, and ultimately, generative.

Faculty

Katherine Horgan

Open, Small Lecture—Spring

LITR 2340

Why do people believe the promises of tyrants? How do you tell the difference between truth and lies? How do people use words to gain power over others? How can we stop them from doing so? These questions worried Renaissance readers as much as they worry us today. Taking their cue from their predecessors in antiquity—Plato, Cicero, Caesar, and many others—the early moderns were fascinated by rhetoric, or the study of persuasive speech. While they rejoiced in rhetoric’s power to create the charming poems and plays that enchant us to this day, authors like Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Milton were equally worried about the power of words to dominate, control, and even to shape reality according to the will of the speaker. In this course, we will examine some of history’s most famous tyrants through the literature of early modernity—Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Richard III, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko—as well as the ancient texts that underpinned the Renaissance discussion of rhetoric: Gorgias’ Helen, Plato’s Gorgias and Phaedrus, Cicero’s De Oratore, Lucan’s Bellum Civile. In our examination of these texts, we will ask how tyrants create themselves, how they gain power over others, and how they establish, repeat, and amplify vocabularies of oppression, gaining power over real-world institutions through their control of language. We will then extend our study to the ways tyranny works outside of the political sphere: in relationships, in the home, and in society at large. As we will come to understand through our reading, the tyrant’s most disturbing legacy is not his power to self-create, but his power to limit the self-creation of others. In close reading the texts that contain these tyrants and their victims, students will come to understand that tyranny—and its resistance—begins at the level of the individual word.

Faculty

Katherine Horgan