ENG 455 - Seminar- A: Renaissance Revenge or B:Reading Endings

TOPIC A: Renaissance Revenge

The words “Renaissance” and “revenge” are usually followed by a third:  “tragedy.”  This seminar will indeed survey selected Renaissance revenge tragedies, those bloody, perverse, ironic plays written by Shakespeare and his contemporaries.  But this seminar will also consider other Renaissance works driven by revenge, including comedies and poems.  It will trace the roots of Renaissance revenge in works such as Seneca’s Thyestes and Machiavelli’s The Prince and the legacy of Renaissance revenge in works such as Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Tarantino’s Kill Bill.  We will study revenge as a means of balancing a plot (one injury initiates the action; another ends it), as economic exchange (the inexact calculations of payback), as an aesthetic form (heads baked in pies, corpses arranged in tableaux), as political resistance (the state’s revenge is called “justice”), and as grounds for theological questioning (when is an avenger an instrument of divine will?).  We will ask, finally, about revenge as a component of modernity, inherited from the Renaissance and canonized in the most conspicuously modern of early modern plays, that masterpiece of Renaissance revenge called Hamlet.

TOPIC B: Reading Endings

This course is structured as a tutorial.  For most class meetings, three or fewer students will meet with the professor to discuss assigned texts.  Students will direct those conversations, both formally, through essays that they will present, and informally, through their preparation.  The course’s broad topic is designed to allow seniors to continue their work as English majors and reflect on that work, at the end of their undergraduate careers.

“Reading Endings” balances the need for shared texts and the recognition of diverse interests.  As much as possible, the course aims to allow space for students to pursue the distinctive passions of their literary studies, within a community of English majors. 

The topic of endings has been essential to literary study since Aristotle began defining comedy and tragedy, and it remains open to the interests that students bring to the course.  Seniors in their final semesters at Davidson might be especially alert to endings.

The shared texts of “Reading Endings” raise questions of aesthetics (what assumptions differentiate satisfying from unsatisfying endings?), questions of creative process (who or what determines when a text is finished?  what endings are supplied when a text-or indeed, a life-seems to need resolving?), and enormous questions of culture (how does the awareness of death color our reading of endings?  what cultural stories seem most authoritative in 2019, and with what endings?).  This vast field of questions extends beyond any single course.  Our thinking, talking, and writing about the topic will accordingly extend beyond the ending of ENG 455.

Prerequisites & Notes
First-year students require permission of the instructor.