ENGL 311 The Literature of Error: Romance and Genre
Before the modern novel, we had romance: the literature of error and erring, stories of characters who set out on a quest and lose their way due to madness, obsession, lack of faith, or the difficulty of knowing the truth about themselves or their quests. Romance was one of the most important genres of imaginative literature in medieval and Renaissance Europe, and yet it was also the one that provoked the most profound moral and aesthetic concern. Hugely popular, romance was often condemned for its endless attention to pleasure, pain, error, and forgetting, for its perverse magical stories of exploration and complicity, for its unseemly analysis of chivalric duty and obsession--and even for its capacity to corrupt its readers beyond repair. (Famously, Don Quixote was driven mad by reading romances!) Whether viewed as a genre of utopian dreaming or of lurid and dangerous narrative failure, romance is a vexed concept. By examining pre-modern and modern genre theory, this class will explore the formation of the category of romance across medieval and Renaissance England (with some attention paid to France, Italy, and Spain), thus giving students an opportunity to consider how genre can enable and constrain understanding of particular works of literature. Texts may include Virgil's Aeneid, Chrétien de Troyes Arthurian tales, Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Crisyede, the anonymous Pearl-Poet’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote, Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, and Mary Wroth’s Urania. At the end of the semester, we may turn to more recent works (such as Samuel R. Delany's speculative fictions or Caroline Bergvall's poetics of error) to get a sense of how pre-modern romance remains an archive for some of the most exciting literary production today.
Major Requirement Met: Group I
Prerequisite
One 100- or 200-level English course, or junior or senior standing