ENGL 40238 - Witches, Knights, Goddesses, and a Robot: On Edmund Spenser¿s Faerie Queene

Institution:

University of Notre Dame

Subject:

English

Description:

On January 16,1599, a hearse borne by poets wound its way through London to Westminster Abbey, their burden destined for burial in a tomb adjacent to Geoffrey Chaucer's in what is now known as Poet's Corner. Once there, the poets who attended the body threw elegies for the dead poet, along with their pens and their tears, into the grave. The deceased, a former scholarship boy whose contemporaries came to call him the `prince of poets', was not Shakespeare nor Donne but Edmund Spenser. Celebrated in his own day, influential for writers as varied as John Keats and C.S. Lewis, Spenser achieved much: a cheeky pastoral poem that announced an obscure twenty-seven-year old as England's new Vergil, an innovative sonnet sequence that departed from gendered norms in striking ways, and, most importantly, The Faerie Queene, a romance epic both dazzlingly learned and delightfully ludic. Our reading assignments will include selections from Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar and Amoretti; our main emphasis will be The Faerie Queene itself. Its range of characters, including a cross-dressed female knight and the first robot in English literature, and of literary forms, such as saints' lives, Ovidian myth, Arthurian legend, and Greek romance, invites its readers to reflect on questions concerning moral and political philosophy, gender and sexuality, faith and misbelief, and much else. Because of its intense, self-reflexive focus on interpretive practices and its insistence on working by induction, through interpretive trials and errors, the poem has occupied a central place in literary criticism from C.S. Lewis to Northrop Frye to Stephen Greenblatt. A good reader of The Faerie Queene promises to be a good reader of much else: the poem still serves as a laboratory for critical innovations in literary scholarship today. It is an excellent training ground for English majors as well as would-be knights (cross-dressed or otherwise). Course assignments will likely include a reader's theatre presentation of a passage from the poem, short response papers, one longer paper written in several installments, and a final exam.

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

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Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.nd.edu

Phone Number:

(574) 631-5000

Regional Accreditation:

North Central Association of Colleges and Schools

Calendar System:

Semester

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