English 203

Other Readings and Media

Spenser, E.: The Faerie Queene; (the Yale U.P. edition of) The Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser

Description

Perhaps this course should be sub-titled Spenserian Recoveries and Explorations, or Wandering in the Spenserian Landscape. I take enormous pleasure in reading The Faerie Queene, but I think it?s hard for people to find that pleasure when it is crammed into a week or two of anxious reading for a course or for orals. A semester won?t really give us the all the time for wandering that we need, but I hope that we can nonetheless create a classroom atmosphere of wandering in which we can acknowledge that we don?t always know where we are going and can be prepared to be surprised?and at least sometimes delighted?by what we find. The wandering won?t be entirely unconstrained?we will read through The Faerie Queene accompanied by various of the shorter works as they seem appropriate and will bump into various critics (monsters? seductive temptresses? trustworthy guides?) along the way?but my hope is that you will find the Spenser most useful and pleasurable to you in the process. I want to leave specifications about class structure and writing requirements a little vague until I see who is actually in the class and what you want Spenser for, but my expectation is that the class will depend in part on group work and that the writing (which will amount to roughly 20 pages) will be configured differently for different students.