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Class number:
3312
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Title: Earthly Delights |
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Department: English |
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Career: Undergraduate |
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Component: Seminar |
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Session: Regular |
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Instructor's Permission Required: No |
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Grading Basis: Regular |
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Units: 1.00 |
| Enrollment limited to 12 |
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Current enrollment: 13 |
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Available seats: 0 |
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Start date: Tuesday, September 3, 2024 |
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End date: Wednesday, December 18, 2024 |
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Mode of Instruction: In Person |
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Schedule: W: 6:30PM-9:00PM, 115V - 106 |
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Instructor(s): Staples, James |
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Prerequisite(s): Prerequisite: C- or better in English 260 or ENGL 160. |
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Distribution Requirement: Meets Humanities Requirement |
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Note: For majors enrolled before December 2023, this course fulfills the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written before 1700. For majors enrolled after January 2024, this course fulfills the pre-1800 requirement or may be an elective/additional literature or film course. |
Course Description:
The Middle Ages is often regarded as a period that was skeptical of worldly pleasure, repressing it at all costs. This course challenges this preconception by considering how pleasure was written about and theorized by medieval people, not just projecting pleasure onto an eternal life to come but sought in everyday experiences on earth, here and now. We will read works by Chaucer and other great literary works alongside travel narratives, accounts of the Golden Age and the Earthly Paradise. Each of these narratives insist on the reality of pleasure, whether discovered far in the east or in one's most secret fantasies. We will collectively consider a historical genealogy of pleasures, and how modern theories of pleasure-including queer theory-fit into these medieval discourses. |