2024 Fall
ENGLISH 100 012 - SEM 012
The Seminar on Criticism
The Faerie Queene: The Ethics of Imagination
David Landreth
Class #:34433
Units: 4
Instruction Mode:
In-Person Instruction
Offered through
English
Current Enrollment
Total Open Seats:
2
Enrolled: 16
Waitlisted: 0
Capacity: 18
Waitlist Max: 5
Open Reserved Seats:0
Hours & Workload
3 hours of student-instructor coverage of course materials per week, and 9 hours of outside work hours per week.
Other classes by David Landreth
Course Catalog Description
This seminar is designed to provide English majors with intensive and closely supervised work in critical reading and writing. Although sections of the course may address any literary question, period, or genre, they all provide an introduction to critical and methodological problems in literary studies.
Class Description
Edmund Spenser's The 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 twelve pages.
This class satisfies the "pre-1800" requirement for the English major.
Class Notes
Book List
Spenser, E., The Faerie Queene; Spenser, E., Shorter Poems; Spenser, E., A View of the Present State of Ireland
Spenser, E., The Faerie Queene; Spenser, E., Shorter Poems; Spenser, E., A View of the Present State of Ireland
Rules & Requirements
Repeat Rules
Requirements class fulfills
Meets Arts & Literature, L&S Breadth
Reserved Seats
Current Enrollment
No Reserved Seats
Textbooks & Materials
See class syllabus or https://calstudentstore.berkeley.edu/textbooks for the most current information.
Guide to Open, Free, & Affordable Course Materials
Associated Sections
None