ENGLISH 345: Practices of Early Modern Writing

Course Description

Writing has lately been described as a skilled "technique of the self" (Foucault), as a linchpin of the modern scientific enterprise (Shapin and Schaffer), and as a "mnemotechnic" that may well be a new site of psychopower (Stiegler). The latter thinker, in bringing Platonic warnings about writing in dialogue with more contemporary technologies, is far from alone in the concern he articulates over the increased capacity to know (in his terms, "savoir") at the expense of capacities to know "how to do" and "how to live" (roughly, savoir-faire and savoir-vivre). The early modern readings of this course aim to open up these questions of savoir-faire in particular, considering practices that may well range from essay writing (Montaigne, Bacon), the humanist exercises of progymnasmata (Aesop's Fables), learned textual commentary, political counsel (Baldwin, Mirror for Magistrates), devotional world-building (Spenser, Bunyan) and life-writing (Wallington, inter alia).