Spring 2009 Courses

English 304: Medieval Monsters, Magic, & Marvels (Krier)

TBA

Monsters, dragons, demons, magicians, shape-shifters, nature spirits, fairies, giants, cannibals, grotesques, and many other fantastic creatures inhabit the stories, poems, and visual arts of the Middle Ages; people undergo enchantments, mysterious sleeps, unhealing wounds; they witness inscrutable marvels.Ê In this course we'll look at a good range of poems and stories about such events-from England, from Wales, from Scandinavia, and from Arabia. From the enormous number of such works, we'll focus on those with crucial motifs: dragons, giants, werewolves, magical bears, shape-shifting transformations, realms of the dead, Arthurian magical figures like Merlin and Morgan le Fay, the Queen of the Fairy race. We'll also read some recent theoretical work about the monstrous and the marvelous. We'll consider the ways that monstrosity works out anxieties about unknown others (Easterners, Africans, women, Saracens, Jews); the effects of enchantment, disenchantment, shape-shifting; the ways that monster-vs.-hero stories handle the interior strains of change, transformation, growing to adult identity. Works will be chosen from among these: Beowulf; Sir Gawain & the Green Knight; The Saga of the Volsungs; selections from those ofÊ The Arabian Nights composed in the Middle Ages; The Mabinogion; Anglo-Saxon riddles; Sir Orfeo and related 12th-century romances of adventure and marvelÊ (all by that great and prolific poet Anon.); excerpts from Ovid's ancient mythological Metamorphoses; excerpts from Thomas Malory's great Arthurian story the Morte Darthur; Marie de France's short narrative-poetic Lais; Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale" and some contemporary analogues to it; visual-arts monsters painted into the margins of medieval books. We'll learn about many more works than we can read together, some medieval and some from our own time; perhaps you can write about some of these, and even contribute your own fictions.