Graduate Program
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USC DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH GRADUATE PROGRAM Photo by Chuttersnap at Unspalsh Spring 2019 Graduate course descriptions @usc_english /DornsifeEnglish dornsife.usc.edu/engl ENGL-510 and, rather like Chaucer himself, masterful perverting humanity through perverting storyteller who potentially receives mate- the word of God? Or, to rephrase Galahad’s rial reward for making illusion into reality. question: How do we any longer know This charismatic purveyor of productive if it is God or the Devil who speaks to us Medieval English falsehood will be analyzed alongside that through the mediating figures represent- most excruciatingly dull of all ecclesias- ing the authority of the Church? And, if we tical hacks, the Parson, who, undeniably don’t know, why don’t we all just become Literatures and Cultures: blinkered adherence to convention not- Protestants and circumvent suspect inter- withstanding, nonetheless brings The mediaries altogether? The Salutary Voices of Satan in Middle English Literature Canterbury Tales to a pious but daunting endpoint by reminding the reader of his or Finally, we shall consider a text that her duties to the teachings of Christ and to anticipates and answers these anxieties. Rollo, David those who would interpret his words. This Composed far from the urban/courtly call to Christianity ends up being all the centers of the South East, Sir Gawain and W | 5:00-7:20p.m. Section: 32778 more challenging in the light of Chaucer’s the Green Knight offers a synthesis of the own Retraction to the Tales themselves: magical and the miraculous that presents Are we really to reject the profitable and Christianity in curious co-operation with At a critical juncture in The Book of Mar- of the late fourteenth century and the eminently enjoyable fictions that have supernatural forces that seem antithet- gery Kempe, Jesus appears and delivers attendant movement toward vernacularity preceded because, implicitly following the ical to it and perhaps offers, in Morgan the following reassuring news to the pro- over Latinity and the widespread criti- Parson’s stipulations, we should be exclu- Le Fay, the master of social change later tagonist: “Daughter, yow now know it was cism of the epistemological tyranny of the sively attentive to the Divine word? Or generations of writers seem so anxious to no Devyl that spoke to yow.” Church. are we left as adherents to the Pardoner’s promote. performance of all we are told we should On more than one count, this obliging The term will be divided into three parts. not be or do? Texts will include all of those already denial of deviltry on the part of the Divine The first will be on Kempe, Julian of Nor- mentioned. We shall make brief forays can only give pause. First, it appears 210 wich and the exploration of the personal The last third of the term will be on onto the continent to consider, during our pages into the modern printed edition, dialogue with the Divine and the accompa- the Arthurian romance, with an initial study of The Man of Law’s Tale, Christine and this self-identifying non-devilish nying anxiety over devilish machination. emphasis on Malory’s late-medieval/ de Pizans’ open denunciation of a mas- Son of God has by this time, among other This will be followed by five weeks devoted early-Renaissance Le Morte D’Arthur, a culinist God from The Book of the City things, assured that Kempe will be a born- mainly to Chaucer. We shall begin with compendium of medieval lore printed of Ladies, in addition to a couple of her again virgin in heaven (despite the fact The Man of Law’s Prologue and Tale, and and published during the first year of the Saints’ Lives in which she exemplifies that she has already given birth to at least look at the way in which Constaunce, the Tudor dynasty and couched in a transi- the lack of empathy toward women she twelve children), proclaimed (with some protagonist (if such is the apposite term tional idiom between late Middle- and ascribes the traditional Godhead, and, in help from Julian of Norwich) that her for someone who never really does any- early-Modern English. Galahad, a consum- tandem with the Pardoner, the sermon tears will guarantee salvation to hundreds thing), contrives to be at one and the same mate prig who rivals even Constaunce as a Jean de Meung (according to recent stud- of thousands of souls, and, most egre- time one of the most unremittingly boring mindless pawn of Divine stricture, will be ies, Archdeacon of Orléans in the 1270s) giously, encouraged her to get in bed with characters in the literature of the Middle the focal figure of attention. After having scripts for Genius, sacerdotal assistant to his Father, the Godhead, and intimately Ages and manages to say one of the most spent three quarters of the text riding Nature, who preaches that the best way acquaint herself with His body in the incisive things ever scripted during the around the Waste Land reprimanding to get to heaven is to have as much sex as ultimate act of Divine matrimony. There period: “Wommen are born to thraldom people for their sinful ways and professing possible. Secondary sources will include: is, then, something decidedly odd about and penance,/ And to been under mannes to be so much better than everyone else, Jeffrey Burton Russell, Lucifer: The Devil this unduly belated assurance that all that governance.” The power that subordi- this most Perfect of all Knights shock- in the Middle Ages, Robyn Malo, Relics and has so far exhaustively preceded is indeed nates women in this way is God himself, ingly ends up actually saying something Writing In Late Medieval England, John legitimate. Also, Kempe’s entire narrative who persistently saves Constaunce from sensible. After hacking a couple of dozen A. Arnold, Belief and Unbelief in Medieval of madness and redemption begins with hardship in order, with apparent sadis- woefully overmatched knights to pieces, Europe, and R.N. Swanson, Indulgences in the voice of the Devil himself explaining tic pleasure, to plunge her into a new he, Percival and Bors pause to consider Late Medieval England. Attention will also that the protagonist needs no confessor cycle of torment (invariably, if oddly, at the carnage they have just wrought and be given to more general studies of medie- because her own personal commitment to the hands of crazed, incestuously driven to countenance the possibility they have val literature by Carolyn Dinshaw, Alastair penance will be sufficient. In other words, mothers-in-law). just committed cold-blooded murder. Bors Minnis, Paul Strom and Lee Patterson. The Book of Margery Kempe begins with attempts to explain everything away by Students will do the reading, attend class, all that Jesus later professes not in fact to This tale of hyperbolically masculinist arguing that God wouldn’t have allowed give a class presentation, and write a paper have been all along attempting to persuade Divine law and true Christianity gone it to happen if He hadn’t wanted it to. of fifteen to twenty pages. Kempe that she should be a good Lollard, a underground (and the suspicion of hear- Galahad, however, begs to differ: “Yee say member of a contemporary and flourish- ing “a Lollard in the Wind” which serves nat so. First, if they mysseded ayenst God, ing proto-Protestant sect. as an epilogue to the Man of Law’s per- the vengeaunce ys nat owris, but to hym formance) will act as an introduction to that hath power thereoff.” Galahad in fact The course will consider precisely this Chaucer’s two favored ecclesiastics. The has a good point: How do we know any ambiguous Divine/devilish narratology of first is the Pardoner, self-identified charla- longer what God permits, especially when the late Medieval text, particularly in the tan, performer of all that seems unnatural the Kingdom of Logres is populated by light of the Wycliffite and Lollard writings (but ends up not being the very opposite), ecclesiastics who, it turns out, are as often as not demons in disguise committed to ENGL-530 Restoration and 18th Century British Literatures and Cultures Anderson, Emily m | 2:00-4:20p.m. Section: 32600 Structured as a broad overview to individual, and trajectories in fem- the eighteenth-century novel and its inism, in light of the recent #metoo associated criticism, this seminar also movement). notes and interrogates the autobi- ographical and biographical elements Assignments will include assem- that exist within these works. How do bling an annotated bibliography of we identify these elements, and what current criticism on a given primary are the implications of their inclu- text and presenting to the class one sion? What historical factors might article selected from this bibliog- account for the interplay between fic- raphy; a written book review of a tion and personal reference, and how recent (last ten years) monograph has this interplay been noted and on the eighteenth-century novel; a accounted for in contemporary crit- mini-conference presentation; and icism? The course will be structured a final, article-length seminar paper in four units to address these ques- with appropriate bibliography. Stu- tions, each anchored by a specific text dents will also take turns leading from the long eighteenth century: part of selected class discussions, as Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Laurence inspired by an individual passage Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Mary Shel- chosen from that day’s primary text. ley’s Frankenstein, and Jane Austen’s The seminar will provide students Emma. Within these units, students with a thorough grounding in eigh- will be exposed to both older and teenth-century studies on the novel, more recent criticism on these works; and it should also appeal to students they will also have a chance to link interested in theories of fiction and these critical topics to contemporary its development, fiction-as-craft, debates (about cultural appropria- and strategies of self-fashioning and tion, approaches to celebrity culture, self-representation.