Literature Pre-1850 Spring 2025
ENGL 301: Lit of King Arthur Adaptations
Instructor: Misty Schieberle
55658 | TuTh 11-12:15 | Wescoe 4047 – Lawrence
Literature about King Arthur and his knights has been hugely influential on modern fantasy, romantic comedies, and coming-of-age stories. This course explores how Arthurian literature started and how it has been adapted throughout the centuries for literary, historical, and even propaganda purposes. We will follow a few symbols (e.g., the sword in the stone, the Holy Grail) and important characters and their actions (e.g., Arthur, Gawain, the Lancelot-Guinevere love affair) through various iterations. Texts will range from medieval literature like Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (in translation) to Tudor-era propaganda, nineteenth-century adaptations, and more modern media. Questions driving the course will include how Arthurian material is represented differently in different genres, how authors reinvent Arthurian narratives to address changing cultural contexts, and, of course, is Arthurian literature some of the first fanfiction? Course requirements include: regular class attendance and participation, quizzes and two short essays and exams. This course fulfills the English 312 or equivalent requirement for the English major.
ENGL 322: Shakespeare
Instructor: Jonathan Lamb
51919 | MW 3-4:15 PM | Wescoe 4051 – Lawrence
In this course, we will read plays across Shakespeare’s career, including The Merchant of Venice, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Hamlet, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale. We will study these texts for their formal complexity, for their engagement with ideas in their historical moments and across time, for a sense of Shakespeare’s development as a dramatist and poet, and for an understanding of how such questions work with respect to performance and print publication. The ultimate goal will be to investigate how Shakespeare’s powerful imaginative worlds were created and made public. Our approaches will be as diverse as the works themselves, covering the whole spectrum of critical methodologies and engaging in all kinds of approaches to learning. Preparation, attendance, and participation are absolutely necessary. Written work will include several papers, two exams, and creative projects.
ENGL 598: Honors Proseminar - Shakespeare's Writing Craft
Instructor: Jonathan Lamb
53539 | MW 12:30-1:45 PM | Wescoe 4020 – Lawrence
In this course, we will study William Shakespeare’s craft as a writer of plays and poems. Informed by recent Shakespeare scholarship, we will focus on a small number of texts: Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Venus and Adonis and the Sonnets. (This list may change, based on student interest and enthusiasm!) We will consider how questions of language, form, textuality, value, and dramatic structure help us speak to critical concerns of gender, social class, race, emotion, and maybe even computation. Students will complete several formal papers and projects, including a long final research project on a topic of their choice.
