Peggy Yoon returns to Kenyon as a visiting assistant professor after having previously taught in the department for the 2016-2017 academic year. Before coming to Kenyon, Peggy was a lecturer of English literature at the University of Exeter (UK) and has also taught at Vassar College. Her research interests encompass the history of ideas throughout the long eighteenth century in Britain with a specific focus on the influence of medicine, philosophy, and religion on the development of the novel.
Her current research projects include exploring the dense literary and philosophical ideas embedded in Maria Edgeworth's 1801 novel "Belinda" and the influence of the passions in the novels of Samuel Richardson and Tobias Smollett. She has held a Chawton House Library Fellowship and was awarded an AHRC conference grant as a PhD student at the University of Exeter. Her teaching experiences have led to a deep love of eighteenth-century satire and she especially enjoys teaching the novels of Jane Austen…
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Peggy Yoon returns to Kenyon as a visiting assistant professor after having previously taught in the department for the 2016-2017 academic year. Before coming to Kenyon, Peggy was a lecturer of English literature at the University of Exeter (UK) and has also taught at Vassar College. Her research interests encompass the history of ideas throughout the long eighteenth century in Britain with a specific focus on the influence of medicine, philosophy, and religion on the development of the novel.
Her current research projects include exploring the dense literary and philosophical ideas embedded in Maria Edgeworth's 1801 novel "Belinda" and the influence of the passions in the novels of Samuel Richardson and Tobias Smollett. She has held a Chawton House Library Fellowship and was awarded an AHRC conference grant as a PhD student at the University of Exeter. Her teaching experiences have led to a deep love of eighteenth-century satire and she especially enjoys teaching the novels of Jane Austen.
Areas of Expertise
British literature and culture from the Restoration to the Romantic period; sensibility and the novel; the passions in eighteenth-century medicine, religion, and philosophy.
Education
2009 — Doctor of Philosophy from Univ of Exeter, Exeter, UK
2002 — Master of Arts from Georgetown University
1993 — Bachelor of Arts from Yale University
Courses Recently Taught
ENGL 103
Introduction to Literature and Language
ENGL 103
Each section of these first-year seminars approaches the study of literature through the exploration of a single theme in texts drawn from a variety of literary genres (such as tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, epic, novel, short story, film and autobiography) and historical periods. Classes are small, offering intensive discussion and close attention to each student's writing. Students in each section are asked to work intensively on composition as part of a rigorous introduction to reading, thinking, speaking and writing about literary texts. During the semester, instructors will assign frequent essays and may also require oral presentations, quizzes, examinations and research projects. This course is not open to juniors and seniors without permission of the department chair. Offered annually in multiple sections.
ENGL 104
Introduction to Literature and Language
ENGL 104
Each section of these first-year seminars approaches the study of literature through the exploration of a single theme in texts drawn from a variety of literary genres (such as tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, epic, novel, short story, film and autobiography) and historical periods. Classes are small, offering intensive discussion and close attention to each student's writing. Students in each section are asked to work intensively on composition as part of a rigorous introduction to reading, thinking, speaking and writing about literary texts. During the semester, instructors will assign frequent essays and may also require oral presentations, quizzes, examinations and research projects. This course is not open to juniors and seniors without permission of department chair. Offered annually in multiple sections.
ENGL 243
Satire, Sensibility and Enlightenment
ENGL 243
This course presents a survey of 18th-century literature from Jonathan Swift to such writers of the 1790s and early 19th century as Mary Wollstonecraft, Olaudah Equiano and Maria Edgeworth. Early 18th-century literature is dominated by satirical works that ostensibly aim at reform through ridicule, even while the great satirists doubt that such an aim can be achieved. Beginning in mid-century, the literary movement of sentimentalism and sensibility rejects the satirical impulse and embraces sympathy, immediacy and the "man of feeling." Throughout the period — indeed already satirized by Swift and Pope — Enlightenment ideals are explored and debated in a new public sphere. These ideals include progress, secularism, universal rights, the systematization of knowledge and the growth of liberty through print and education. Through an examination of works in a variety of literary genres (prose and verse satire, periodical essay, novel, tragedy, comedy, descriptive and lyric poetry, and travel writing), the course will introduce students to such authors as Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke and Thomas Gray. This counts toward the 1700–1900 requirement. Open only to first-year and sophomore students who have taken ENGL 103 or 104. Offered occasionally.
ENGL 251
Studies in Romanticism
ENGL 251
This course will focus on the lyric poetry of the Romantic period, from William Cowper to John Keats. We shall also consider criticism, autobiographical writing, essays and novels by William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Keats. In this course, we shall investigate two central claims: first, that Romantic poetry is not simply nature poetry but rather philosophical poetry about the interrelationship between natural objects and the human subject; and, secondly, that Romanticism develops a notion of aesthetic autonomy out of very specific political and historical engagements. This counts toward the 1700–1900 requirement. Open only to first-year and sophomore students who have taken ENGL 103 or 104. Offered annually.
ENGL 351
The Romantic Period
ENGL 351
This course will explore some of the complexities and contradictions in the literature of the Romantic period. A period that came to be identified with the work of six male poets in two generations (Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge; Byron, Shelley and Keats) also is the period in which the English novel achieves considerable subtlety and broad cultural influence. In addition to the poets, then, the course will include works by such novelists as Walter Scott and Maria Edgeworth. While lyric poetry becomes increasingly dominant and the sonnet undergoes a revival in this period, there remains a poetic hierarchy in which epic and tragedy occupy the highest positions. The course will therefore include dramatic poems, whether or not such works were intended for performance, and a consideration of the epic impulse. The course will examine the tension between populism (and popular superstitions) and the elitist alienation of the Romantic poet, and the relationship between political radicalism and both Burkean conservatism and an abandonment of the political ideals of the French Revolution in favor of imaginative freedom. In addition, this course will introduce students to recent critical studies of Romanticism. This counts toward the 1700–1900 requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing or ENGL 210–291 or permission of instructor.
ENGL 453
Jane Austen
ENGL 453
This course will focus on the works of Jane Austen — from a selection of her juvenilia, through the six major novels, to the unfinished "Sanditon." Additional texts for the course will include Austen's letters and a biography of the author. The class will consider film adaptations of Austen's novels, both as these films are positioned within and as they escape from the nostalgia industry of costume drama. Austen's works will be situated formally in relation to the novel of sensibility, the "Bildungsroman", the comic novel, the tradition of the romance genre, and the development of free indirect discourse. Her novels also will be considered in relation to the late 18th-century development of feminism, controversies over women's education, and the formulation of the separate sexual spheres. Ultimately, the course will address how an author who claimed to work with "so fine a Brush" on a "little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory" responded to such major historical events as the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, English radicalism and the abolition of the slave trade. This counts toward the 1700–1900 requirement. Permission of instructor required.