What is pastoral? Is it portrayal of shepherds? Representation of simplicity that is superior to complexity, nature to artifice, rural life to urban values? Why, though it was considered a low genre, as compared to epic and tragedy, has the pastoral endured into modern times? Can Arcadia, a nostalgic portrayal of a Golden Age, be set in the future? Is there such a thing as Utopian pastoral, or should we, in dreaming up opposition to the present, distinguish between the Arcadian perspective, turned towards the past, and the Utopian one, focused on the future, as W.H. Auden has argued?
These are some of the questions that we shall attempt to answer in this course. We shall start with the classical conventions of pastoral, established by Theocritus and Virgil, and trace their elaborate transformations, which take such diverse generic forms as song, eclogue, epithalamium, epic, prose romance and comedy, in major Renaissance pastoral works: Sidney’s Arcadia (excerpts), Spenser’s Shepheards Calendar and The Faerie Queene, Book VI, and Shakespeare’s As You Like It. We shall look at later Renaissance poetry by Milton and Marvell and examine the pastoral influences in such later poets as Pope and Wordsworth. We shall then redefine the pastoral ethos and concerns and trace their presence in 19th – 20th century prose: George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Willa Cather, Sarah Orne Jewett, Tom Stoppard, Flannery O’Connor, Philip Roth, Annie Proulx. This is a list from which the final selection is still to be determined; if you are interested, you are welcome to contact me at annakis@post.tau.ac.il, and I shall let you know as soon as I have it. I am also still open to suggestions, if you would like me to include a favorite work you believe belongs on the list.

Requirements: a midterm and a final examination, a term paper, oral report and/or quizzes as required; attendance and participation. In your term paper, you will be able to trace the influences of the pastoral in any literary work of your choice (you may also draw relevant parallels with the fields of music or the fine arts, if you have the necessary background), not necessarily from our syllabus.