Instructor: Nicholas Watson
Monday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: Barker 269
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
Course Site
A study of a series of visionary works written between the thirteenth and early fifteenth centuries, including Jean de Meun's Romance of the Rose, Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, John of Morigny's Book of Flowers, Geoffrey Chaucer's House of Fame, William Langland's Piers Plowman, Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love, and Christine de Pisan's Book of the City of Ladies. We read these works as contrasting products of a particular (and time-limited) conception of the imagination as an instrument of human perception and its affordances and dangers as this conception meets ancient traditions of writing about the validity or otherwise of dreams and of spiritual, or perhaps corporeal, descents into hell and/or ascents to heaven. We consider the inter-relationship between the poetic and the visionary in light of the categories of "orthodoxy" and "discretion of spirits" during a period when both were fiercely contested. We also consider visionary writing as a precursor of the concept of the "fictional" and of the novel, with particular reference to W. G. Sebald's 2001 novel Austerlitz.
Space permitting, this course is open to qualified undergraduates. Please contact Prof. Watson before classes begin if you would like to take the course.