English 190

Research Seminar: The Faerie Queene: The Ethics of Imagination

Book List

Spenser, Edmund: The Faerie Queene

Other Readings and Media

Further reading will be distributed via bCourses.

Description

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.

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