Section | Semester | Instructor | Time | Location | Course Areas |
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9 | Spring 2018 | Landreth, David
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TTh 2-3:30 | 225 Dwinelle |
Spenser, Edmund: The Faerie Queene
Further reading will be distributed via bCourses.
Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene (1590-96) is the most vast, most gorgeous, and most deliriously strange of English poems. Its hallucinatory dreamworld mingles self with landscape, character with plot, happenstance events with essential truths. The poet's prodigious imagination whirls us across the poem's world—a world of bold and blundering knights, diabolical yet ridiculous wizards, and treacherously seductive works of art. Yet its poetic voice claims at all times to be teaching us something about how to live in our own world—some ethical ideal—while remaining strangely suspicious of its own imaginative power.
Our central question in this seminar will be what it might mean for us to be taught by such a poem: does learning happen when we read the The Faerie Queene? If so, how, and what kind? Do we learn from charting the poem's elaborate and conflicted structures of morality? From the working out of its loosely woven tales of adventure? From the internal challenge posed to the poem's ethical intentions by its own dazzling techniques of imaginative pleasure? Or from actively resisting the poem's ideological commitments to monarchical government, colonial oppression, and religious strife?
In addressing that complex question, we will spend time attending to The Faerie Queene's techniques of artistry; immersing ourselves in its sprawl; considering how it chooses and manipulates its sources in classical epic, in Scripture, and in medieval romance; reading some central critical approaches to the poem; and considering its legacy for speculative fiction, fantasy, and science fiction in contemporary writing. In our own writing we'll experiment with those different ways of encountering the poem, building up to a research assignment of about fifteen pages.
This section of English 190 satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.
Please click here for more information about enrollment in English 190.
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Research Seminar: Literature on Trial: Romanticism, Law, Justice |
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spring, 2019 |
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Research Seminar: California Books and Movies Since World War I |
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Research Seminar: Carnal Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Literature |
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fall, 2018 |
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Research Seminar: Laughter and Vision: Explorations in the Novel of Ideas |
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Griffin, Ben
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Research Seminar: California Books and Movies Since World War I |
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Research Seminar: Trials of Literature: Romanticism, Justice, and the Law |
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Research Seminar: California Books and Movies Since World War I |
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fall, 2017 |
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Research Seminar: Another Day in Purgatory: Irish Literature and the Afterlife |
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Research Seminar: Monsters, Exiles, and Outlaws in Medieval Literature |
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Research Seminar: Historiography and Narrative: Literature and the Interstices of History |
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spring, 2017 |
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Research Seminar: Writing a World in Crisis: Medieval and Modern |
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Research Seminar: Place-Love: Fiction and the Melancholy of Form |
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