SMALL THINGS syllabus

by KARL STEEL

Don't miss Jonathan Hsy's SUMMER DIGEST below.

CUNY's Fall Semester starts next Monday, which means that yesterday was the last possible date for me to really wrestle my SMALL THINGS seminar into a syllabus. With a swarm of help over at a social media site, I had (most of) my texts.

With this, my second PhD seminar (the first, here), and my first since Tenure and Promotion (!), and my last before Sabbatical (!), I'm now noticing the obvious: how my scholarship and habits of thought determine the shape of a (not just for MA students) graduate syllabus. It's here that the syllabus is most personal; I expect or at least want students to want to think like I do, which means a syllabus that's either frenzied, crowded, jumbled, recherché, or learned, or all of these, depending on what you think about how I think. There's just a little below that I've taught before.

By several requests on twitter, it follows, below. Subject to change of course:

Fribourg, Couvent des Cordeliers, Ms 25, 104v

ENGL 80700: Small Things

Professor Karl Steel
M 2-4pm

Grad Center Room 4433

Office Hour: 4-5pm and by appointment

Email: ksteel@brooklyn.cuny.edu
Twitter: @karlsteel

“Shewe forth thyn ers, and lat the frere se
Where is the nest of freres in this place!”

And er that half a furlong wey of space,

Right so as bees out swarmen from an hyve,

Out of the develes ers there gonne dryve

Twenty thousand freres on a route” (Canterbury Tales, Summoner’s Prologue)

“Now, very slowly, the famous New York skyline comes through the mist. At first it looks like one of those scenes in stenciled cardboard fashionable in London theatre just after the War. Here I have the same experience as Mr Bergeret’s little dog Riquet: ‘As I approach an object, I grow less.’ Soon the spectacle becomes overwhelmingly grand: I am now no size at all.” – James Agate, “My American Journey”

Critical animal theory has tended to focus on larger animals, while ecocriticism has tended to focus on systems. What, however, of small, only seemingly inconsequential things? This course will range from Lucretius to Hooke and Cavendish to study swarming animals like worms, insects, and other vermin, the basic building materials of existence, and little people, some real, and some legendary (like the Green Children of Woolpit). The course will focus on medieval texts, but will frequently range into early modern material, particularly in its final weeks.

Required Texts (purchase or library)

Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, trans. Winthtop Wetherbee (Columbia UP, 1973, 1990)

J. Allan Mitchell, Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child (U of Minnesota P, 2014)

Chrétien de Troyes, Yvain: The Knight of the Lion, Burton Raffel, trans (Yale UP, 1987)*

* other not terribly old translations may be substituted: the Kibler Arthurian Romances (Penguin) is good

Week	Date	Reading	Theme and Assignments
1	8-31	1. Derrida “The Animal that Therefore I am” 2. “Bi a forrest as I gan fare” DIMEV 922 3. Margaret Cavendish, “The Hunting of the Hare” (EEBO and U of Virginia Library)	THEME: Ethics of the (One) Other
2	Thu 9-10	1. Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia 2. selections from Lucretius, On the Nature of Things (c. 1650 translation by Lucy Hutchinson) Recommended: Kellie Robertson, “Abusing Aristotle”	THEME: Physics and the Scale of Matter Assignment: Presentation
3	9-21	J Allan Mitchell, Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child	THEME: Human Growth Assignment: Find a text or image from your field and talk about it in relation to a particular passage from Mitchell’s book (I’m bringing in Chronicles of Jerahmeel IX, “The Formation of the Child”)
4	9-28	1. Green Children of Woolpit: Ralph of Coggeshall (in English; in Latin); 2. William of Newburgh (in English [from Godwin appendix in Broadview]; in Latin) 3. Godwin, Man in the Moone (excerpt) 4 John Clark, "'Small, Vulnurable ETs': The Green Children of Woolpit" Science Fiction Studies (2006) 5. Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman 201-11 6. Goldberg, “Childhood and Gender in Later Medieval England” Viator (2008)	THEME: The Uncanniness of Children Assignment: Presentation
5	10-5	1. Aristotle, Historia Animalium, V.19 2. Augustine, On the Trinity, III.4-9 (all things caused by God) 3. Albert the Great, Questions Concerning Aristotle's Historia Animalium, Book V, question 1, and XVII, questions 4-14 (wind eggs and spontaneous generation) 4. Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe, 1:314–24 (on mechanical necessity) 5. Hooke, Micrographia, 123-25 6. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Gutarri, A Thousand Plateaus, “Introduction: Rhizome” (use this for help) Recommended:  Ian MacInnes, “The Politic Worm: Invertebrate Life in the Early Modern English Body,” in The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, ed. Feerick and Nardizzi, 253-74	THEME: Swarms and Non Familial Development Assignment: Presentation
6	10-19	1. Yvain 2. “Disputation Between Body and Worms” (Middle English; Modern English; Manuscript (with images!)) 3. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter, “Chapter 7: Political Ecologies” SUSAN CRANE VISIT	THEME: Ethics of the Other meets the Ethics of the Swarm, plus herds and giants Assignment: Presentation
7	10-26	1. Chaucer, “Prioress’s Tale” (from Canterbury Tales) 2. Higgins trans, Book of John Mandeville, Chapter 29, on Gog and Magog, 157-60 3. Thomas Dekker, Lanthorne and Candle-Light, Chapter 8, “Moone Men” (EEBO and Early English Books) 4. Broadside “The braue English iipsie” (EEBO, and Broadside Ballad Archive) 5. John Hartigan, jr, Aesop’s Anthropology, “Are Natives Plants or People?”	THEME: Swarms, Racism, and Fantasies of Contagion Assignment: Presentation
8	11-2	1. Exeter Book, Riddle 27 (available in Price article below) 2. Bees and the Eucharist (start here; for more, see Anne Harris “Issues of Scale”) 3 and 4. Campana, Joseph. "The Bee and the Sovereign: Political Entomology and the Problem of Scale," Shakespeare Studies 41 (2013): 94-113 and "The Bee and the Sovereign (II): Segments, Swarms, and the Shakespearean Multitude," in Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies, Volume II Recommended: selections from Lisa Jean Moore & Mary Kosut, Buzz: Urban Beekeeping and the Power of the Bee Helen Price, “A Hive of Activity: Realigning the Figure of the Bee in the Mead-Making Network of Exeter Book Riddle 27” postmedieval (March 2015)	THEME: The Domesticated Insect Assignment: Presentation
9	11-9	1. Book of Hours, Netherlands, c. 1494, Morgan M.1078 2. Rowland trans of Moffet’s Theatre of Insects, selections (the bee and the use of flies) (text also available here in easier to print form) 3. Richard Leigh, “Greatness in Little” (EEBO) 4. Hooke, Micrographia, selections (feet of a fly, eyes of a drone fly, of a blue fly) 5. Margaret Cavendish, “A World in an Eare-Ring” (EEBO and Norton)	THEME: Before and After the Microscope Assignment: Presentation
10	11-16	1. “Voyage of St Brendan” (focus on islands & whales) 2. Letaldus of Micy, "About a Certain Fisherman whom a Whale Swallowed" 3. “Patience” (Middle English story of Jonah) 4. Granger “A Moste true and marueilous straunge wonder” (EEBO and English Broadside Archive) 5. “A True and Wonderfull Relation of a Whale” (EEBO)	THEME: The Human Made Small Assignment: Presentation
11	11-23	1. Trevisa, Polychronicon Vol 2, 180-185 2. Exeter Riddle 30 3. Plato Philibus, 235-237 (Loeb Classical), 20e-21e 4. Gelli Circe Oyster and Mole 5. Enlightenment Encyclopedia, “Innate” & “Pleasure” 6. selections from Joanna Zylinska, A Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene	THEME: Oysters and Agency Assignment: Select your book to review (180-300 pages, from this century) Assignment: Presentation
12	11-30	1. Ben Tilghman, “Marking Time” and “Divinity in the Details: Miniaturization and Meditation in a Passion Cycle by Johannes Wierix” 2. Rothschild Canticles (a small book) 3. Carla Freccero “Chercher la chatte: Derrida’s Queer Feminine Animality” 4. Catherine Mills, “Biopolitics and the Concept of Life”	THEME: Assorted Small Things, Review of course themes
13	12-7	Book review presentation	Assignment: 2-page academic book review (maximum 1000 words) Bring in a short associated text for discussion
14	12-14	Workshop on Paper writing	Assignment: Bring in a short passage from a primary text for discussion
15	12-21	Presentations	Final paper due