ENGL170U PO - The Faerie Queene

When Offered: Irregularly
Instructor(s): C. Rosenfeld
Credit: 1

This seminar is dedicated to Edmund Spenser’s epic romance The Faerie Queene. Learning how to read the Faerie Queene is a bit like learning how to navigate a new dimension of reality, discovering a unique and counterintuitive set of laws and principles as you move along, stanza by stanza. Knowing that the world of The Faerie Queene functions differently from the one we more usually inhabit, we will ask: How does it work? What are its rules and first principles?  What are its boundaries and borders?  What kinds of relationships does it construct with the natural world and the historical world?  

This broad set of questions about the poetics of world-making will guide us through a variety of literary techniques and conversations, with topics including allegory, gender and sexuality, colonialism, instruction and play, form and discipline.  Our most sustained inquiry will take shape in a 20-25 page paper and readings will include recent accounts of the central aims and methods of the discipline.