11:15a-12:30a TR (30) 3 cr.
This course is an exploration of literary texts from medieval England
that weren't written
by Geoffrey Chaucer. Contrary to the what most people think, there
was a rich literary
tradition that existed before, during, and after Chaucer wrote his
Canterbury Tales.
For example, there was the first autobiography in English written by a
medieval housewife
turned mystic (The Book of Margery Kempe), medieval plays that
were so popular that
they were performed for hundreds of years, even after the Middle Ages
had given way to the
Renaissance, political poems that inspired class revolt, and lyrics
that ranged from the
bawdy to the sacred. This course will introduce you to some of these
texts in translation
for the most part, and it will consider the various historical,
philosophical, and gender
debates that swirled around these texts. In addition to reading these
texts, we will look
at a few contemporary films that attempt to understand the present in
terms of the Middle
Ages, and we will try to articulate how the medieval and the
postmodern intersect, using
Umberto Eco's essay, "Dreaming the Middle Ages." The course will
require two 6-8 page
papers, a midterm and final exam.