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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Cyclopes, blemmyae, giants, women with the tails of lions, fairies, Chthulu-like beings from the chaotic abyss: these creatures and many more occupied the margins of human geography for centuries. In ancient thought, monsters were not merely fantastical creations, but existed as important ways of talking about humans and their society: despite their distance - living as they did in India, Africa, the depths of the sea or the burial mound, sometimes even on the moon - monsters and marvelous beings have been intimately involved with Western understandings of what it means to be a human being. While we will consider a few major works such as Beowulf and Shakespeare's The Tempest, we will also look at stories of werewolves in Norse saga and French romance, madmen, Biblical and apocryphal tales of monsters and fallen angels, classical and medieval "travelogues" (including voyages to outer space), and other sources to acquire an understanding of the historical and cultural contexts that make medieval texts different from - and yet similar to - our own. Secondary critical readings will help students toward a sense of the many different issues at play in the primary works, from historical context to more in-depth considerations of gender, geography, and race.
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3.00 Credits
During the English Renaissance, drama became an immensely popular art form, appealing to citizens across classes both in London and in the country. Bloody, dark, sensational, and sometimes even comical, tragic drama (and all its sub-genres) became a box-office staple of English theaters. Because English drama grew in part out of the medieval morality play tradition, and because much of this drama paradoxically emphasized violence and morality, spectacle and spirituality, this course will examine the plays of the most influential dramatist of the English Renaissance and their intersections with problems of violence, tragedy, religion, and sacrifice. What are the possible connections between dramatic violence and English Renaissance culture? To what extent is religion or spirituality bound up with Shakespeare's stage, his plots, and his characters? How does drama represent tragedy and sacrifice, and what possible relationships are there between staged violence and the audiences that witness it? And what is it about tragedy both as a dramatic genre and as a way of making spiritual or religious sense of real-life events that is so appealing to Shakespeare's age, and to our own? In addition to introducing Shakespeare's major plays and examining some of them through film and performance history, this course will also include plays by Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, and John Webster.
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3.00 Credits
From the popular series The Tudors to the recent novel Wolf Hall, from the classic play A Man for All Seasons to big-screen films like Elizabeth: The Golden Age, our culture is fascinated by the English Renaissance, that period when religious devotion and erotic love seemed to exist side by side. In this course we will explore the secular and sacred love poetry of this fascinating period of literary history. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries - the period of the Reformation and the rebirth of humanism - England experienced an intense flowering of literature, both secular and religious, from the sonnets of Shakespeare to the passionate prayers of George Herbert and John Donne. Paradoxically, the period's religious verse drew its force from a reaction against "courtly" and "profane" love poetry at the same time as it was deeply influenced by that poetry both in form and content. Hence, we will examine the influences and conflicts within this body of English literature, poetry praying to and seducing lovers both human and divine. We will explore questions such as: how do the secular and erotic influence religious poetry? What are the conflicts (and similarities) between sacred and profane love? How do faith and religion shape literature? How does poetry represent or build love and communion? And what connections can we make between the self, culture, literature, and devotion? Authors covered include William Shakespeare, John Donne, George Herbert, and John Milton.
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3.00 Credits
This course will cover not only standard film versions of the plays but also adaptations and appropriations in order to examine the way in which Shakespeare circulates in popular and elite culture. Likely films include: Olivier's Hamlet and The Last Action Hero (with Arnold Schwarzenegger); Zeferelli's Romeo and Juliet, Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, and Shakespeare in Love; Polanski's Macbeth and Billy Morrissette's Scotland, PA; Derek Jarman's The Tempest and Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books. In each case, we will begin with a reading of the play before moving on to film versions and adaptions.
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3.00 Credits
Beowulf is one of the oldest poems in English, the closest thing we have to a medieval English epic, a literary monument of extraordinary complexity, and a study in heroic behavior that evaluates and problematizes every aspect of the folklore, myth, and legend that it weaves into its narrative. The relationship between Beowulf and early medieval heroic legend will be front and center in this course, which will undertake a close reading of the poem set against several comparable exemplars of heroic behavior in neighboring medieval traditions, including the Old English Battle of Maldon, the Old High German Hildebrandslied, the Old Welsh Gododdin, the Latin Waltharius, the Old Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge, the Old French Chanson de Roland, and the Old Icelandic Hrólfs saga kraka (all in modern English translation). We'll look carefully at how heroic characters are represented and defined in these texts, and we'll consider the part played by feud, revenge, honor, loyalty, and social bonds and allegiances in constructing a heroic ethos. Weekly response papers, two essays, and a final exam.
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3.00 Credits
How do we imagine religious experience? What happens when religion becomes an image, either visually, dramatically, or on the page? In this course, we will approach this question through the plays of William Shakespeare and a handful of his contemporaries, focusing on English Renaissance playwrights whose works stage the cultural tensions and competing religious claims of Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and atheists, not to mention the supernatural (ghosts, witches, devils, etc.). While we will explore a handful of themes in relation to these works-faith and the will, religious outcasts, and violence and justice-we will spend most of our time asking how the presentation of these religious themes in dramatic form and on the stage affects their meaning. We will do so by way of comparison, both comparing Shakespeare's plays with the frequently under-read works of Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, as well as setting their images of religious experience against the Bible, Renaissance painting (e.g., Bosch, Bruegel, Caravaggio, and Rembrandt), and contemporary film versions of the plays.
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3.00 Credits
Between 1790 and 1830, the movement known as Romanticism profoundly changed the artistic, musical, historical, religious, and political sensibilities on the Continent and in Britain. Romanticism marked a turn from the rational formalism of the Classical period and reawakened an interest in myth, religious faith, the imagination, and emotional experience. In this course, we will focus principally on the German contribution to Romanticism and trace its origins, development, and eventual decline in works of literature, philosophy, theology, music, painting, and architecture. Works to be studied will include those by the writers Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), and Friedrich Schelgel; the philosophers Fichte and Schelling; the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher; the painters Caspar David Friedrich and some members of the Nazarene school; the composers Franz Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn, and Robert Schumann; and the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel.
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3.00 Credits
"Otherworldly" fiction as well as the theological, critical, and philosophical writings of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the Inklings.
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3.00 Credits
An exploration of the empire as theme in selected Irish writers of the late 19th century.
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3.00 Credits
Diverse perspectives on Irish and British history and literature provide a frame for discussing violence and social change, sexuality, economics, and politics in novels written in Ireland and Britain during the last half of the 19th century.
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