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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Map's The Quest of the Holy Grail; Dante's Divine Comedy; Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; Cervantes' Don Quixote.
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3.00 Credits
A survey of Renaissance literature based on what kind of knowledge these texts think love affords.
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3.00 Credits
This course examines the visual and dramatic aspects of literary religious writings. Texts include: The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (selections), The Cloud of Unknowing (selections), Julian of Norwich's Showings, The Book of Margery Kempe, the York Corpus Christi Plays, from the Creation to the Last Judgment, and Chaucer's Summoner's' Tale.
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3.00 Credits
A survey of the comedic plays of William Shakespeare.
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3.00 Credits
The Middle Ages have been praised and reviled, romanticized and fantasized. The spectacular popularity of Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and Narnia have brought a revival of interest in and curiosity about the Middle Ages. But what were they like, these ten centuries between Rome and the Renaissance? In this course, we will explore major themes and issues in medieval civilization in an attempt to offer some basic answers to that question. We will have in view three kinds of people: rulers, lovers, and believers. But we will also study carefully those who wrote about those kinds of people. We will constantly ask how can we know about the Middle Ages, and what kinds of things can we know? We will consider major literary texts as both works of art and historical documents. We will explore various kinds of religious literature. We will try to understand the limits, boundaries, and achievements of philosophy and theology. Some lectures will incorporate medieval art so as to add a visual dimension to our explorations. This course will constitute an extended introduction to the dynamic and fascinating world of the Middle Ages.
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3.00 Credits
The large body of history, verse chronicle, heroic narrative, poetic romance, and prose fiction - all gathered under the canopy term "Arthurian Legend" - represents one of the most fascinating and most enduring literary phenomena of western culture. In this class, which will follow a lecture-discussion format, we will read a selection of writings that reflect the textual trace of Arthur from his earliest appearances in mytho-historical chronicles beginning in the sixth century and extending from the earliest medieval poetic and prose fictions featuring Arthur and the members of his court, through the great array of writers, past and present, who have tended these myths and legends with such imaginative care. Our readings, which begin in the Middle Ages, will culminate with the "Arthurian revivals" of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the latter extending to theatrical and film texts ranging from "Camelot" and Eric Rohmer's Perceval to Monty Python and Indiana Jones in their post-modern questing for the Holy Grail. In addition to attending ways in which the sheer pleasures-of-the-text have been constructed by these gifted authors, our own "literary quest" will involve questions of historical and social context, gender and genre, the history of reception, modes of literary representation including techniques of symbolic and allegorical figuration, and ways in which the theoretical and/or ideological positions of both writers and their audiences constrain and inspire the works they produce. While pondering how and why this vast body of myth and legend, clustered around the figure of Arthur, has managed to survive and thrive through such remarkably variant shifts of time, place, and circumstance; and while reflecting thoughtfully on our own investment in - or resistance to - the variety of assigned readings, each student will choose for particular close study an Arthurian hero, heroine, or villain (Lancelot, Gawain, Guinevere, Galahad, Merlin, Modred, etc.), as well as some mytho-historical theme like the Round Table, the Grail Quest, the Sword-in-the-Stone, the Bride Quest, the Giant Combat, the Fatherless Boy, the Childless Queen, etc., as this "character" or "motif" presents some specific problem in interpretation. These "character studies" and thematic clusters will form the basis of two short essays, one due at mid term, one at end term. Specific topics, which will be shaped through individual consultation with the teacher, should, in the course of their critical argument, engage a variety of formal, stylistic, and rhetorical practices that have been employed by writers from the twelfth to the twentieth century as they conform to - and create fresh versions of - the plenitude of literary exemplars that characterize Arthurian Legend. Creative projects - individual or collective - are also welcome and, with the approval of the teacher, may be substituted for one of the essays. These alternative ways of investigating the materials of Arthurian Legend might include original poetic or prose compositions, dramatic presentations, graphic arts, videos, and/or musical performances, vocal or instrumental performances.
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3.00 Credits
An examination of selected plays of Shakespeare, with an emphasis on Shakespeare's development as a dramatist and his techniques of character development.
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3.00 Credits
Close readings of some of the seminal texts associated with "courtly love": the love songs of the troubadours, the Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes, Chaucer's Troilus, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, among others, with a focus on how romantic love is portrayed.
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3.00 Credits
Stories of questing knights and unending, heroic landscapes have enjoyed popularity in recent film versions of The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, and even Beowulf. This course will explore the foundations of the heroic quest narrative in early British literature, focusing in particular on the transformations of the epic and romance genres in Medieval and Renaissance literature. What ties heroic tales to a given nation or culture? How do stories of knights, ladies, monsters, and faeries become vehicles for other ideas, such as religion, sex, and politics? And what happens when these stories become reimagined in early "modern" genres of drama, satire, and the novel? We will approach these questions by considering the epic ideal of the English warrior hero, and then follow it through the wanderings of the poetry, prose, and drama of Chaucer, Malory, Spenser, Shakespeare, and others. While we will spend the majority of our time on earlier British literature, we will consider, in class discussions and student presentations, contemporary versions and film representations of English epic and romance.
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3.00 Credits
In less than two decades, the Republic of Ireland has shifted from a relatively poor country with a high level of national, racial, and ethnic homogeneity to a country with the world's fourth highest per capita income experiencing an exponential expansion of cultural diversity. One of the names used to describe this shift is "New Ireland," and this course will discuss the cultural dimensions of this term. We will examine selections from contemporary Irish literature and film which contribute to this analysis and contextualize our discussions with legal, political, and economic approaches to Irish social issues. Class work will include several short papers, a long research paper, and an exam.
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