ENGL 6370 - Baroque Files

(crosslisted)
(also COML 6571)

Fall. 4 credits.

P. Lorenz.

What is a “file?” What kind of mind creates a file? Early modern institutions played an enormous role in the global development of systems of information management, administration, and organization. The course focuses on the concept of organization as it emerges from practices invented in economic and legal institutions, including especially Jesuit colleges and missions in the early modern period. (As Etienne Balibar and others have pointed out, the Greek term nomos (“law”) also means organization.) We will follow the history, philosophy and style of the file, as it is imagined, developed and tested out in texts by Shakespeare, Bacon, Donne, Cervantes, Maria de Zayas, Baltasar Gracián, Milton and Defoe. Topics include exemplarity, diagnostics, production aesthetics, and the psychological or psychoanalytic notion of a “case.”