Circulating Bodies: Commodification, Sex Work, and Enslavement in Eighteenth Century England
ENGL 314
Spring 2024
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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. |
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.
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Additional Requirements and/or Comments:
Contributes to the fulfillment of ENGL major requirements: British Literature, Literary History II, Research Option, elective. |
Instructor(s): Smith,Courtney Weiss Times: ..T.R.. 02:50PM-04:10PM; Location: DWNY100; |
Total Enrollment Limit: 15 | | SR major: 6 | JR major: 6 |   |   |
Seats Available: 2 | 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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