Marjorie Curry Woods

Boys Being Women:

Rhetoric, Gender, and Emotion in the Classroom

Women’s emotions in Virgil’s Aeneid were an important part of the school experiences of St. Augustine. As he tells us in the Confessions, he “grieved for Dido, slain as she sought by the sword an end to her woe,” and one of his school assignments was to rewrite in prose and perform his version of Juno’s speech expressing her “grief and rage that she could not keep the Trojan prince [Aeneas] from coming to Italy…” (Conf. 1.13 and 17). Augustine was not alone in this experience. Many schoolboys in the ancient, late antique, medieval, and early modern periods performed and composed speeches by very emotional literary (and, in the byzantine tradition, biblical) characters, often women, as an integral part of their study of rhetoric. These speeches and the pedagogical tradition to which they belong will be the object of our study this semester.

From the point of view of the history of creativity, the most important aspect of this tradition is the element of fantasy and projection on the part of the students. We will examine the psychological implications and pedagogical usefulness of such training both in historical terms and also with regard to how some of these exercises might be modified for our own classrooms, where we encounter some surprisingly similar issues. Recent research on memory, empathy, and emotion will form part of our discussions.

Emotion filtered through the lens of gender was a key component of the internalization of texts, with profound effects both in the classroom and on female characterization by adult writers like Chaucer, and as Lynn Enterline’s recent Shakespeare’s Schoolroom suggests. Centuries earlier, Statius’s unfinished Achilleid presented a young Achilles whose gender- (and species-)bending adolescence was found so useful by medieval teachers that they completed the work and made hundreds of copies of it. New translations and recent scholarship reveal a rich and textured history of experimentation in crossing boundaries for pedagogical purposes. We will add to this scholarship even as we investigate what insights into the modern classroom knowledge about this tradition may give us.

The course is open to graduate students at all levels and should be useful for and accessible to those in a number of disciplines. It functions as both as an approach to premodern texts via a thematic core and also a survey of a significant part of the western rhetorical, literary, and pedagogical tradition rarely studied as a whole.

All required readings will be in English, but a number of surviving student exercises from the earlier periods are still untranslated. Thus, translation projects as well as analyses from any historical, methodological, or theoretical approach will be welcome as topics for the research paper required of each student.

Written assignments will include a short paper (either creative or analytical) at the beginning of the semester, followed by a research paper submitted in two drafts. I like to have as wide a variety of students in my classes as possible, and those focusing on later periods will be allowed to write their research papers on material relating to their own areas of study. Each student’s topic will be worked out in consultation with the professor. Students will make two informal presentations, one on the readings for a particular class and another at the end on the research paper.

Preliminary list of readings:

Several books of Virgil’s Aeneid and selections from Augustine’s Confessions.

Statius, Achilleid in a new translation now in preparation; selections from recent critical studies Transvestite Achilles and Achilles in Love.

Libanius, Exercises in a Speech in Character.

Aphthonius, Progymnasmata (graded rhetorical exercises); selections on emotional speeches from other rhetorical handbooks.

Chaucer, selected short texts or Troilus and Criseyde.

Shakespeare, As You Like It and/or Marlowe, Dido, Queen of Carthage.

Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom.

McGaugh, Memory and Emotion.

Essays by Suzanne Keen, Jeffrey Walker, Raffaella Cribiore, Manfred Kraus, Eugenio Amato and Gianluca Ventrella, Federica Ciccolella, Vessela Valiavitcharska, Jan Ziolkowski, and Marjorie Curry Woods.

[The final list of readings will be determined by the interests and strengths of the students.]