Fall 2004 Courses

English 194: Tales of Enchantment, First Year Seminar (Krier)

TTh 1:00-2:30
OM 011

Tales of magic, spells, wizards, witches, talking animals, extraordinary powers and dangers are plentiful today, and inform much of the best-loved genre fiction. To what do they owe their power? How do writers think about enchantment? Is it a good experience, a bad one, frightening, empowering, disabling disorienting? How and when is enchantment connected to illusion, how and when to truth? How does it help writers reflect on their own artistic adventures? Why and how does it think through questions about gender and desire? When and how does the idea of enchantment come to be an idea about all of literature itself? In this course we'll both open up to the allure of enchantment and analyze how writers represent it, by studying works from antiquity to the present, by writers male and female, from East and West-stories of enchantresses, wizards, shape-shifters, fairies, genies, mysterious woods, metamorphoses, snake-women, ass-men. We'll look at complex works that might increase the resonance of your own reading in contemporary fantasy or science fiction. We'll also read some theoretical work to help us think about the uncanny, the fantastic, the grotesque. The works we'll study, a mix of long and short works, folk genres and high genres, will include selections from Homer's Odyssey, Apuleius' ancient novel The Golden Ass, medieval romances of Celtic fairies, something from those tales among The Arabian Nights composed in the 18th and 19th centuries, Shakespeare's plays A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, selections from narrative poetry on magic by Edmund Spenser (The Faerie Queene), John Milton (Comus), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Christabel), John Keats (Lamia), musical works by Mozart (The Magic Flute) and Stephen Sondheim (Into the Woods), Angela Carter's contemporary, revised versions of fairy tales The Bloody Chamber, A. S. Byatt's high-spirited reflection on the Arabian Nights, called The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, John Crowley's novel Little, Big, a collection called The Medusa Reader. We'll launch study of the Mozart and Sondheim with special noontime class sessions run together with our early-afternoon regular sessions, when we view productions on tape (refreshments provided). One of the writing assignments will be to create your own tale of magic, informed by the genres and traditions in which we'll be working. As with all first-year seminars, this course requires lots of writing-that too a transformative, joyful, anxious, uncertain experience, not unlike magic itself.

Fall 2004 Course Listings