Romance and Melancholia

This subject has the following teaching availabilities in 2008:

For the purposes of considering request for Reasonable Adjustments under the Disability Standards for Education (Cwth 2005), and Student Support and Engagement Policy, academic requirements for this subject are articulated in the Subject Overview, Learning Outcomes, Assessment and Generic Skills sections of this entry.

It is University policy to take all reasonable steps to minimise the impact of disability upon academic study, and reasonable adjustments will be made to enhance a student's participation in the University's programs. Students who feel their disability may impact on meeting the requirements of this subject are encouraged to discuss this matter with a Faculty Student Adviser and Student Equity and Disability Support: http://services.unimelb.edu.au/disability

This subject focuses on two contrasting representations of human experience in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English literature. Traditionally described as 'Elizabethan romance' and 'Jacobean melancholy', each developed a set of distinctive characteristics that can be studied most engagingly in its symptomatic masterpieces: idealism in Spenser's epic romance The Faerie Queene (1590-96), and melancholia in Shakespeare's tragedy, Hamlet (1599-1601). Where romance offered an sympathetic expression of the court structures and cultural achievements of Elizabeth's reign, melancholia became the key note of the political, economic and cosmic pessimism of the fin de siécle . Both 'romance' and 'melancholia' will be studied as literary forms, social discourses and somatic formations. These are the contexts in which we will reconsider some famous literary texts by Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne, and the encyclopaedist of the syndrome of melancholia, Robert Burton. Students who successfully complete this subject will be familiar with the central philosophical, political and literary forms of romance and melancholia and will understand contemporary critical and cultural paradigms for the reading of Elizabethan and Jacobean texts.

• be able to apply new research skills and critical methods to a field of inquiry;

• develop critical self-awareness and shape and strengthen persuasive arguments;

• be able to communicate arguments and ideas effectively and articulately, both in writing and to others.

Students who have completed 106-210 Elizabethan Texts are not eligible to enrol in this subject. This subject can be credited as an elective subject towards the Graduate Certificate or Graduate Diploma in Gender Studies.