Circulating Bodies: Commodities, Prostitutes, and Slaves in 18th-Century England
ENGL 314
Fall 2020
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01
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In the newly booming consumer culture of Enlightenment England, people were constantly buying and selling things--bespoke suits and manufactured trinkets as well as human bodies. Sex workers used their bodies to enter into trade agreements, and the imperial economy was built on the enslavement of African people. This course will explore how people and things were turned into circulating objects, and it will trace these as they were passed from hand to hand, valued and revalued, used, abused, and discarded. We will listen as the "things" themselves tell ethically and socially urgent stories. In the period, consumer objects, sex workers, and enslaved peoples all wrote memoirs (or had ones imagined for them). We will read these texts alongside contemporary debates about economics, labor, race, abolition, and women's rights, and we will return again and again to fundamental questions about personal identity, individual agency and passivity, commodification, objectification, and the very limits of the human. |
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| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
HA ENGL |
| Course Format: Seminar | Grading Mode: Student Option |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
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Fulfills a Requirement for: (ENGL) |
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Past Enrollment Probability: 75% - 89% |
| SECTION 01 |
Major Readings: Wesleyan RJ Julia Bookstore
"Anon., THE HISTORY AND ADVENTURES OF A LADY'S SLIPPERS AND SHOES
Aphra Behn, OROONOKO
John Cleland, FANNY HILL: OR, MEMOIRS OF A WOMAN OF PLEASURE
Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, THOUGHTS AND SENTIMENTS ON THE EVIL AND WICKED TRAFFIC OF . . . SLAVERY
Daniel Defoe, ROXANA
Olaudah Equiano, THE LIFE OF OLAUDAH EQUIANO
William Hogarth, HARLOT'S PROGRESS
George Lillo, THE LONDON MERCHANT
Alexander Pope, THE RAPE OF THE LOCK"
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Examinations and Assignments:
Frequent reading responses, two papers, and a presentation. |
Additional Requirements and/or Comments:
This course will involve both asynchronous work (prerecorded lectures, reading responses, and opportunities for collaboration) as well as shorter, 40 minute synchronous discussions twice a week. There will be occasional *optional* in-person group meet-ups for students who happen to be on campus.
English majors who prefer an in-person course and need to fulfill their Literary History II requirement may wish to consider Prof. Stephanie Weiner's ENGL288: "Poets, Radicals, and Revolutionaries."
This course meets the current English major requirements of Literary History II and Literatures of Difference and contributes to the British Literature concentration requirements.
Class of 23 forward: Fulfills the Literary History 2 and British Lit requirements of the Literature path in the English major.
It offers the Research Option for Honors thesis writers. |
| Instructor(s): Smith,Courtney Weiss Times: ..T.R.. 02:50PM-04:10PM; Location: ONLINE; |
| Total Enrollment Limit: 15 | | SR major: 6 | JR major: 6 | | |
| Seats Available: 5 | GRAD: X | SR non-major: 2 | JR non-major: 1 | SO: 0 | FR: 0 |
| Drop/Add Enrollment Requests | | | | | |
| Total Submitted Requests: 0 | 1st Ranked: 0 | 2nd Ranked: 0 | 3rd Ranked: 0 | 4th Ranked: 0 | Unranked: 0 |
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