ENGL 211
Renaissance Remix Spring 2025
Division I

Visiting 17th-century England might feel like stepping into another world–with its peculiar fashion, superstitions about witchcraft, and terrible sewage systems–but how far have we really traveled from the Renaissance? This course aims to explore that question, showing how that other world is, in fact, close to home. We will read works in various Renaissance genres and pair them with contemporary examples from the same forms: early lyric poetry + the modern pop song; a Renaissance masque + music videos; revenge tragedy + Tarantino, heroic drama + Game of Thrones, Shakespeare’s court drama + Succession, a Restoration Comedy + Pirates of the Caribbean, and selections of Milton’s Paradise Lost + William Blake + Toni Morrison’s A Mercy. The goal of the course is to track the ways in which 21st-century writers and filmmakers continue to work within Renaissance modes, ultimately figuring out why the last few decades return to such recognizably 17th-century preoccupations.