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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
This graduate seminar will be an intensive study of Spense's work. We will attend to the ground-breaking The Shepheardes Calendar (1579), Amoretti and Eplithalamion (1595), and several of the shorter poems. Our main emphasis, however, will be The Faerie Queene (1590-96). The epic is a hungry form, and Spenser's version is no exception: The Faerie Queene consumes and remakes myths, saints' legends, chronicle histories, and iconographic traditions; in so doing it schools its readers in the practices not only of Renaissance allegory and imitatio but also of interpretation itself. Because of its intense, self-reflexive focus on interpretive praxis, the Faerie Queene has occupied a central place in literary criticism from C.S. Lewis to Northrop Frye to Stephen Greenblatt; the poem still serves as a laboratory for methodological innovations in literary scholarship. As Spenser's poem is encyclopedic in its range, students will gain experience not only with Spenser's work but also with the Renaissance culture it emerged from and shaped. Our readings of Spenser will therefore be contextualized with selections from authors as varied as Vergil, Petrarch, Castiglione, Plutarch, St. Paul, Jean Calvin, Ovid, John Bale, Aristotle, Thomas Malory, Walter Ralegh, Ariosto, Tasso, and Thomas Cranmer. Students will be introduced as well to major movements and emphases in Spenser scholarship in order to prepare them to contribute to ongoing conversations. Course projects will likely include short, regular response papers; a class presentation on an assigned canto from the Faerie Queene, supported by a bibliography of relevant analogues, sources, and major articles or chapters on the material in question; and an article-length essay on a topic of the student's choosing.
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3.00 Credits
The Vercelli Book is a tenth-century collection of Old English poetry and homilies which stands alongside the Beowulf manuscript, the Exeter Book, and the Junius manuscript as one of the great treasures of Old English literature. This is the manuscript that contains The Dream of the Rood, Andreas, and Cynewulf's Elene and Fates of the Apostles, as well as twenty-three prose homilies on topics as divergent as the miracles that occurred at Christ's birth, the life of St Guthlac, the lassitude of women, the signs presaging Doomsday, and the colorful transformation of the soul at the moment of death. We'll read most of the poetry and about half of the homilies, and we'll explore in some detail the connections between the homilies and the Latin sermon literature of the period. Requirements include weekly response papers, an oral report, an annotated bibliography, and a seminar paper. Textbooks: The Vercelli Book, ed. G. P. Krapp, Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records 2 (1932); The Vercelli Homilies and Related Texts, ed. D. G. Scragg, EETS o.s. 300 (1992).
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3.00 Credits
Close readings of 17th Century British Poetry.
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3.00 Credits
Close analysis of several preserved Middle English texts, with a focus on the interchange of texts between audiences.
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3.00 Credits
A close examination of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts of the late 800s.
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3.00 Credits
A close examination of the selected Old English and Middle English prose, with particular emphasis on manuscript construction and collaboration.
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3.00 Credits
The course will be a journey inside the ultimate nightmare in the whole history of literature: Dante's Inferno-a prison for eternity, accurately subdivided like a model-dungeon, perfectly organized, with no possible evasions, no bribery to the guardians, no leagues between inmates, crossed through by two traveling poets, one of them relating about their trip with outstanding precision, the other guiding him after rescuing him and becoming one of the great characters of the entire poem. We will study this great metaphor of a cosmic incarceration created by Dante's genius, and the amazing variety of the world of the convicted felons, and the philosophical ideas that rule this descent into the womb of the Earth where Lucifer, the utmost convict, lies.
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3.00 Credits
TThe course aims at establishing links between literature and the central problems of human life. If literature does not speak to the living, then it is worth absolutely nothing. There will be four main themes, organized as an itinerary or progression from one to the other: Death, Wonder and Knowledge, Com-passion, Recognition and Rebirth. Death is the problem of each single human being; the pursuit of knowledge is one way of removing or overcoming death; com-passion is a way of adding personal feeling to knowledge of the other in the flesh; recognition (knowledge of the other in the flesh) can lead to rebirth and possibly resurrection. These themes will be studied by means of literary (and philosophical) texts in a comparative manner.
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3.00 Credits
This course will survey the extant canon of both "religious" and "secular" dramatic texts - primarily those from the fourteenth-century up the the establishment of the professional theaters in the sixteenth in England, though we will also attend to antecedent practices in liturgy and civic spectacle. In addition to this survey, the course will also provide an introduction to primary source material in the Records of Early English Drama to allow us to investigate dramatic performance in historical context and will examine some of the more recent critical trends in scholarship by Carol Symes, Sarah Beckwith, and Ruth Nissé, among others, who have examined the definition and role of "drama" in medieval culture more broadly. Assignments will include a few short papers and presentations and one larger research project.
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3.00 Credits
The course will render the students familiar with some basic texts from two millenia. We will begin with Aristotle's "Poetics", discuss Horace's "Ars poetica" and Longinus's "On the sublime". The medieval period will be represented by a work by Dante. A special focus will lie on the creation of modern literary criticism in German idealism, but we will also discuss post-idealistic works (including Nietzsche) and end with Roman Jakobson's groundbreaking structuralist approach to the nature of poetic language.
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