Research-oriented and designed for upper-division English majors. Intensive examination of critical approaches, literary theory, or a special topic in literary and cultural studies. Topics vary from semester to semester. Students should consult the department's "Announcement of Classes" for offerings well before the beginning of the semester.

This research seminar concentrates on Greco-Roman myth, mythology, and mythography in early English literature, with special interest in how it can make the reader a co-creator of meaning. We start with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, an influential instance of Greek mythography in the Roman world, before turning to medieval and early modern writers in this tradition: Boccaccio, Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, Dante, Gower, and Shakespeare. Rather than pitting Renaissance humanism against medieval scholasticism and moralization, as so often has been the case, or reading the contradictions between different versions of the same myth as mistakes or discrepancies, we instead approach myth as a multivalent “instrument of thinking.” We consider how meaning takes shape in the gaps between different accounts of the same myth, both within individual works and in the conversations that unfold between different authors. Along the way, we will consider how the texts and artworks of Greco-Roman antiquity have been used to legitimate and critique certain political agendas and ideologies, such as imperialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and the like. We will also attend to the rich tradition of Black classicisms, asking whether the appropriation of myth can be a subversive act.

Book List

Boccaccio, Il Filostrato; Chaucer, The Knight’s Tale, The Legend of Good Women; Christine de Pizan, Epistre Othea; Dante, Commedia; Gower, Confessio amantis; Lydgate, Siege of Thebes; Ovid, Metamorphoses; Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Requisites

• English 100 is prerequisite to English 190.

Repeat Rules