Encounters with the Other:
A hero who battles a female water monster at the bottom of a lake. A communion wafer that turns to a lump of bleeding flesh. A lion-headed man who lures travelers with his ability to speak all languages, and then devours them. Royal cannibals, lawsuits against animals, and divine and demonic impregnation. Encountering the British Middle Ages from the perspective of twenty-first-century America may feel like a confrontation with a wholly unfamiliar culture. But as this course will show, there are ways we can connect with those who lived and wrote during this time period. One such connection may be precisely our dislocative sense of encountering the Other in the medieval: this course will focus on medieval writers’ own representations of encounters with beings and concepts considered strange, alien, or Other: God and the Devil, Jews and Saracens, animals and fantastic beings, women, birth, death, and the afterlife. Their reactions to these encounters range from wonder to terror, love to hatred, ecstasy to anguish; so too may our reactions to these texts!
The course will require significant amounts of reading as well as active class participation, individual conferences, and peer critique. You’ll be doing both informal and formal writing, including short responses to the readings and a short (4- to 5-page) and a longer (10- to 15-page paper) that will require outside research. The large majority of the texts will be available in a class reader; you will also be required to get a copy of Beowulf and possibly another text.