Days: Wednesday & Friday
Times: 2:00-3:20 p.m.
Marvellousness (mirabilis, merveille, merveillos) suffuses French and global premodern literatures, crossing borders of time, place (and modern nation-state boundaries), form (literary genre, type of artefact), audience (social class, occupation, gender), and register. From monsters to miracles, from mysterious other-worldly beings to marginal drolleries, imaginative marvels and their preservation through storytelling help us to understand perceptions of pre-modernity and their continuity into our present world. This course is for anyone who is interested in speculative fictions, escapism and consolation, playfulness, the weird and the awesome, beauty, and the delights of dark humour and satire.
Our adventures will focus on the imaginative worlds of some French “merveilleux”texts from the 12th to the 18th centuries (CE): Marie de France’s Fables and Lais, the anonymous Aucassin and Nicolette, Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables, and the fairy tales of Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont and Charles Perrault. We will also encounter bestiaries, encyclopaedias, universal histories, saints’ lives, maps, almanachs, books of hours, lyric and debate poetry, games, and manuscript marginalia. While our principal focus will be the close reading of literary works, we will also consider their context and transnational influence; the historical landscape in which these landmarks are situated; the cultural background against which their actions are staged; and their relationship to an integrated creative and intellectual environment of visual and plastic arts, music, ideas, technology, ecology, medicine, and science.
Classes consist of interactive lectures interspersed with discussions. Weekly topics and recurring themes may include: perceptions of the natural world, creation and creativity, miracles, enchantment, other worlds and the other-worldly, dream-visions and mysticism, the fantastic, automata, metamorphosis and hybridity, apocalypse, nostalgia, utopias and other alternative worlds, and intelligent life.
