ENGL 197: |
Upper-Division Seminar
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Early Modern Romance |
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| Spring 2007 |
| Instructor: James Kearney |
| Meets on: MW 1100-1215 - SH 2716 |
| Prerequisites: Writing 2, 50, or 109; English 10; or upper-division standing |
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| This course cannot be repeated and is limited to upper-division English majors only. |
In Cervantes' Don Quixote, the Knight of La Mancha famously loses himself in romances, heroic tales of amorous intrigues and knightly adventures. Why were these tales of knights and dragons, wizards and women warriors - these tales that Cervantes lovingly skewers - so immensely popular in the early modern period? How did these imagined worlds reflect, refract, or simply disregard the real world that readers of romance inhabited? In this course we will read a selection of romances, focusing primarily but not exclusively on the forms the genre takes in early modern England. Our goal will be to attend to the kinds of cultural work that the genre of romance performs. Topics of discussion will include the functions of genre; the power of nostalgia; the politics of gender; the ethics of representing violence; and the problem of justice. After getting our feet wet with selections from Homer's Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid, we will turn to texts such as Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare's The Tempest, Cervantes' Don Quixote, and Wroth's Urania. |
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