Reading & Composition

When chastity works, nothing happens. A story centered on the absence of sex might not sound like much of a story at all, but chastity, along with its sister virtues of modesty and moderation, has long been a hot topic for hit plays and best-selling novels.

In this course, we will see what happens, or doesn’t happen, when men and women try to control women’s (and, less often, men’s) bodies, and when chastising husbands get chastened themselves. We will meet pious “revirginators” and impotent schoolmasters, ice princesses and coy mistresses, cuckolds and cads, and multiple virgins who turn into trees. We will ask what cultural obsessions with preserving sexual purity have to do with discourses of public morality, public health, and environmentalism. We will try not to get frustrated when texts don’t easily surrender their meanings, and we will even try to think of reading as something other than forcing texts to give something up to us.

This is a writing-intensive course, with an emphasis on the salutary self-chastening process of revision, and students will be asked to complete short creative writing assignments as well as formal analytical essays.

Potential texts include:

Aristophanes, Lysistrata

Sophocles, Oedipus the King

Ovid, Metamorphoses

Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe

Shakespeare, Othello

Milton, Comus

Molière, The School for Wives

Lafayette, The Princess of Clèves

Goethe, Elective Affinities

Joyce, “A Painful Case”

Lorca, The House of Bernarda Alba

Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

selected poems by Ronsard, Shakespeare, Donne, Herrick, Marvell,

Shelley, Hopkins

Film:

Sembène, Xala (1975)

Heckerling, Clueless (1995)

Herzog, Grizzly Man (2005)