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.

What does it mean to be in conversation with a story set in its own distant past, whose creator and purpose are unknown, whose subtle, strange, sophisticated structures resist settled answers and easy categorization? In this course, we will read the Old English poem Beowulf in translation, in a facing-page edition that will allow us to dip into the original language as needed as we investigate the work’s many mysteries. We will pair careful close reading of the poem with medieval analogues and critical essays, to help us understand the poem’s cultural backdrop as well as controversies in modern interpretation. Our discussions will leverage as well the analytical power of translation, taking as critical prisms renderings by Seamus Heaney, Meghan Purvis, Maria Dahvana Headley, among others. Prior knowledge of Old English will be helpful but is not required. As students develop individual research projects through weekly written responses and in-class workshops, we will also peer over the shoulders of early readers in the three centuries of Beowulf scholarship, to explore the poem’s stakes for past audiences, and what it might have yet to say to us now.

This class satisfies the Pre-1800 Major Requirement

https://english.berkeley.edu/major-requirements

Book List:

Roy Liuzza. Beowulf: Facing Page Translation – Second Edition. Broadview Press. 2012.
Supplementary texts and a course reader.

Requisites

• English 100 is prerequisite to English 190.

Repeat Rules