ENGL 122

Fall 2019 All Classes

All Classes

Swords, Sorcery & Sex: The Middle Ages in Popular Culture

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Credit: 3 hours.

Explores the use of medievalism in contemporary popular culture. Instructors may draw from film, television, music, fiction, graphic novels, gaming, and other sources, and they approach the material from a variety of cultural, historical, and aesthetic traditions. The goal of the course will be to understand how the medieval periods of world cultures have been reinvented in modern times, and how modernity has been constructed in relation and in opposition to the medieval imaginary.

Same as MDVL 122.

This course satisfies the General Education Criteria in Fall 2022 for:

Humanities – Lit & Arts

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ENGL 122 class schedule data for fall 2019
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	71512	Lecture-Discussion	C	12:00PM -12:50PM	MWF	148 Armory	Basu, A	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/26/19-12/11/19 Degree Notes: Humanities - Lit & Arts course. Section Info: The Medieval in Popular Culture - The objective of this course will be to understand, through cinema, how medieval periods are reinvented in modern popular cultures. This way, we moderns often project our worst fears (from barbarism to sexuality, hygiene, or table manners) onto an imagined past. We also use constructions of the medieval as mirrors to look critically or laugh at our own selves. We use such cultural modes to understand who we are and how exactly we have come into being. That is, we make our own modern myths as well as deconstruct them. In this class, we will watch and read about films like Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones 1975), The Canterbury Tales (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1972), The Adventures of Robin Hood (Michael Curtiz, 1938), The 13th Warrior (John Mctiernan, 1999), Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015), Kingdom of Heaven (Ridley Scott, 2005), Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954), and Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Students will be required to view films at home or in the library, maintain a journal, do group presentations, and write two 5-6 page papers over the course of the semester.