E1 05/27-07/03 08617 CARGES ONLINE BY ARRANGEMENT
Dreams, Knights, and the Plowman: Allegory and Imagination in Medieval Literature
Female knights fight a gory, deadly battle within a person's mind. A mysterious plowman seems to be humanity's best hope against the apocalypse. A dreaming poet is caught by a golden eagle and flown to a temple atop a mountain of ice and a spinning wicker house that makes a deafening sound.
These fantastical scenes all come from the medieval allegories that we will study in this course, but they are not purely fantastic. Rather, these were literary efforts to grapple with some of the most essential human problems: how to live a good life, how to think about death, how to love, and how to grieve. In this course, we will study how allegory can answer such questions and how saying one thing while meaning another can paradoxically be a way to truth. We will learn about the basic structure of allegorical literature (narratives meant to convey a meaning apart from what literally happens in the story) as well as the interpretive traditions it inspired throughout the medieval period. We will also think more broadly about what imagination can do as a tool for understanding our world, and how imaginative literature can reveal truths that might otherwise remain obscure.
This is an asynchronous online course. Students will be responsible for completing readings and watching lectures. The course grade will be based on two major projects (one literary analysis essay and one creative project) and much smaller but more frequent written responses to the readings. There will be no group work, although you will engage your classmates' ideas through the smaller written responses. Most of our readings will be poetry, with some brief prose excerpts and a short play. Most readings will be in modernized English and a few will be in the original Middle English; no previous experience with Middle English is assumed or required, and we will use a number of reading strategies to make sure everyone has full understanding without an undue amount of work.