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.

The 10th century “Exeter Book” is filled with Old English elegies and religious verse, love-laments and list poetry, saints’ lives, riddles, fatherly advice and much more. Variously called a miscellany, an anthology, a bookshelf, a museum — and possibly once used as a cutting board — the Exeter Book resists simple categories of the lyrical vs. utilitarian, scared vs. human, bookish vs. playful, and stretches our understanding of what poetry, and the work of reading, did and can do. In this class, we will approach these poems along three dimensions. Firstly, we will explore the poems historically and alongside other early English texts and artifacts, to constellate what we can and cannot know about the manuscript’s material and contextual world. Secondly, we will consider how these texts have been read in their post-medieval reception, to understand the stakes and assumptions underlying earlier scholarly efforts to make sense of the medieval past. Finally, we will ask how these poems make sense to us now — how they stretch our familiar notions of genre and voice, what new translations and adaptations seek by reaching back to old words, and further – how negotiating the tensions between these three dimensions of meaning-making can nuance our own hermeneutic practices as critical readers. In addition to participation and in-class presentations, assessment includes small weekly exercises, two short written assignments, and a longer final project that engages our readings in creative/critical conversation. Prior experience with Old English will be helpful but not obligatory; all materials will be provided in both Old English & Modern English translation.

Repeat Rules

Requirements class fulfills