220b

English 220b

M. McInerney

MW 12:30 -2

HU III

The English Epic

Through close readings of Classical, Medieval and Early Modern texts, this course will investigate the poetic and narrative strategies of epic poetry. We will pay particular attention to the backwaters and cross-currents of the tradition in English, and to the tendency of the whole genre to self-parody in the form of mock-epic. While the English tradition can, in one sense, be said to begin with Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon epic left almost no mark upon the subsequent history of the genre. The heroic impulse in the English tradition is instead much more powerfully influenced and complicated by the antithetical models of Ovid and Vergil. We will explore the tensions and contradictions between insular narratives and traditions and the continuing power of classical, continental models, in works such as the Middle English Alliterative Morte Arthur, which aspires to high seriousness, Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale, which elevates mock-epic to moral commentary, and Spenser's Faerie Queene, which embodies both impulses. The course will culminate with Pope's satiric mini-epic, The Rape of the Lock, and we will consider the survival of certain epic elements in contemporary cinema by analyzing the heroic and mock-heroic qualities of a pair of American films, Coppola's Apocalypse Now and the Coens' O Brother Where Art Thou.

Readings: Vergil, The Aeneid, trans. Fitzgerald (Vintage)

Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Melville (Oxford)

Beowulf, trans. Seamus Heaney (Vintage)

King Arthur's Death, ed. Benson and Foster (TEAMS)

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Nun's Priest's Tale (Xerox)

Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Maclean and Prescott (Norton)

Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock, ed. Tillotson (Routledge)

Packet of critical readings

Requirements: Regular attendance and participation; 2 short (3-5 page) essays; one longer, research essay; final examination.

This course fulfills the pre-1800 requirement.