Mar 29, 2024  
Catalogue 2019-2020 
    
Catalogue 2019-2020 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

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ENGL 237 - Medieval Literature

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)


This course serves as an introduction to medieval literature, with a focus on Middle English literatures (c. 1066-1550). Students will become familiar with the linguistic and stylistic features of Middle English, and will read a variety of texts from the period. Special topics for the course vary from year to year; examples of topics include: Arthurian literature, Chaucer, the Chaucerian tradition, women’s writing in the Middle Ages, transnational/comparative medieval literatures (including French and Italian), medieval “autobiography,” the alliterative tradition, Piers Plowman and the Piers tradition, dream visions, fifteenth century literature and the bridge to the “early modern,” literature and heresy, gender and sexuality in the Middle Ages, and medieval mystical writing. Students engage throughout with the process of establishing English as a “literary” language; authorial identity; the grounding of English literary tradition; and the role of translation and adaptation in medieval writing. The course also prepares students who might wish to pursue work in medieval literature at the 300 level, and/or pursue a senior thesis in the period.

 

Topic for 2019/20a: The Canterbury Tales. In this course we spend the semester on the road with Chaucer in a collective reading of his encyclopedic human comedy, The Canterbury Tales, sauntering with him through fourteenth-century England.  An important part of this leisurely immersion is sensory and linguistic, as we experience the text in the original Middle English, acquiring as an added benefit facility in English philology. Through close reading, class discussion, and writing we consider the Tales as they provide diverse, intersecting pathways into Medieval critical attitudes toward social and class distinctions, religious and gender antagonisms, town/gown animosities, discourses of desire and sexuality, and conflicts born of a developing urbanism during England’s transformation from a feudal to an early modern society.  Besides this “social Chaucer” we consider the “clerkly Chaucer,” and what the Tales tell us about his influential insights into authorship and reading, language and meaning, science and nature, philosophy and ethics, history and collective memory, psychology and the construction of a modern self. Thomas Hill.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS



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