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Campus | Bryn Mawr |
Semester | Fall 2024 |
Registration ID | ENGLB332001 |
Course Title | The Invention of the News |
Credit | 1.00 |
Department | Latin American, Iberian, and Latinx Studies |
Instructor | Perez,George M. Newman |
Times and Days | TTh 02:40pm-04:00pm
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Room Location | |
Additional Course Info | Class Number: 2604 The News the idea that things are happening and everyone should know about it through easily accessible media defines our highly networked lives today. Our relationship to news, however, is quite fraught: anxieties about the veracity of our sources and the supposed objectivity of writers abound. But news, and the chief anxieties associated with the form, enjoy a long history. News is often associated with the birth of democracy, the nation, and the public sphere. The news has also played an often overlooked and greatly understudied role in the promulgation of theories of race, the expansion of empire, and the development of capitalism. This course offers a rethinking of the history of news beginning in the sixteenth century, revealing the genres debts to travel writing, literary culture, and popular print (including ballads and pamphlets). While this course aims to chronicle the history of news, it also moves to tell the histories of colonialism from the masses of popular print that document, debate, and disseminate its histories. Among the questions this course will interrogate are: what is the relationship between early news and literature? How does empire catalyze information culture? How do early debates around race and colonialism shape the emergence of what we might recognize as news culture? Readings include Thomas Mores Utopia, Bartholomew de las Casas Brief History, Cortezs Five Letters, Hakluyts Principal Voyages, Shakespeares Merchant of Venice and Tempest, Ben Jonsons masques and Staple of News, Aphra Behns Widow Ranter, Defoes Robinson Crusoe, and a selection of early modern pamphlets, ballads, and criticism. Approach: Course does not meet an Approach; Haverford: B: Analysis of the Social World (B), A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts) (A) Enrollment Cap: 15; If the course exceeds the enrollment cap the following criteria will be used for the lottery: Majors and minors by class (seniors then juniors) |
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