ENGL 514

Fall 2017 All Classes

All Classes

Seminar in Medieval Literature

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Credit: 4 hours.

Intensive study of selected texts, genres, themes, or theoretical issues in medieval British literature (usually focusing on either Old English or Middle English texts), or of scholarly methods in medieval studies (such as editing, paleography, or bibliography and methods of historical research).

Same as MDVL 514. May be repeated if topics vary. Prerequisite: A college course devoted entirely to an aspect of medieval studies or consent of instructor.

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ENGL 514 class schedule data for fall 2017
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	39510	Lecture-Discussion	E	1:00PM -2:50PM	W	123 English Building	Barrett, R	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/28/17-12/13/17 Section Title: Nature and the Non-Human Section Info: Topic Section E: Nature and the Non-Human in the Chivalric Romances of Medieval and Early Modern England A man or woman on horseback in the midst of a trackless forest—this is the archetypal protagonist of chivalric romance. From an ecocritical perspective, it’s also an actor-network, an assemblage of companion species (human, horse, tree) enmeshed in an ongoing process of natureculture. Textualized as romances, these entanglements participate in the co-constitutive articulation of civilization (bios) and wilderness (zoe). They seek to establish the primacy of the human over the non-human (and are thus kin to the ecological crises of our own twenty-first-century moment), but they simultaneously demonstrate (consciously or not) humanity’s inability to achieve such separation and autonomy. The knight in shining armor may defend his people from monstrous werewolves (Marie de France’s Bisclavret) and witches (Edmund Spenser’s Duessa) and green giants (the Gawain-Poet’s Sir Bertilak), but he is just as often a predatory monster himself (e.g., the cannibalistic Richard Lionheart, the diabolical Sir Gowther, or the rapist-knight of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale), calling into question the utility of monstrosity as category. Over the course of the semester, we’ll explore these and other interspecies interactions, familiarizing ourselves with both the romances of the past and the ecocriticism of the present. Our assignments will combine brief reading responses with the obligatory seminar paper, and our texts will cover some five centuries of literary production in the British Isles, beginning with Marie’s twelfth-century Lais and ending with Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Be sure to bring your own critical interests to the class: the ideas outlined in this brief description are only a starting point for our ecologically-inflected discussion of genre. Restriction(s): Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.