Handbook 1996 : Faculty of Arts (Volume 3 page 63)
English Language subject : Next:106-210 | Search | Help
Availability: Not offered in 1996.
Credit points: 16.7 2nd and 3rd year
Coordinator: Bernard Muir.
Prerequisite: 106-224/324 Introductory Old English Language and Literature.
Contact: Two 1.5-hour seminars per week.
Timetable: Second semester
Objectives:
Students completing this subject:
- will have read Beowulf, the earliest surviving English epic;
- will have achieved a deeper understanding of the subtleties of Old English, enabling them to perceive rhetorical figures, formal structures and narrative strategies in medieval literature;
- will have an understanding of the perceived essential elements of Western epic and of how new works in the tradition draw upon and/or work against generic expectation;
- will have become familiar with the heroic ethos of the Anglo-Saxons, and have seen how extended narrative developed from an embryonic presence in earlier, shorter, (oral) literary forms (i. e. lays, panegyric, eulogy);
- will have studied the impact of Christianity on the traditional pagan Germanic heroic ethos;
- will have become acquainted with the rebirth of Anglo-Saxon studies in the 16th-17th centuries, and of the ideological crises which prompted the renewal of interest in the earliest English writers.
Content:
An advanced course in which the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf will be read in the original. Students will become acquainted with critical issues relating to the study of Medieval literature.
Assessment:
Written work of up to 5,000 words.
Prescribed texts:
English Language subject : Next:106-210 | Search | Help
Handbook 1996 : Faculty of Arts (Volume 3 page 63)
Status: Official 1996 Date created: Oct 9 1995 Last modified: Oct 9 1995 Authorised by: Academic Registrar Email enquiries: Course_Information@registrar.unimelb.edu.au
Maintained by: Dept. of English, Faculty of Arts.
Copyright © University of Melbourne 1995,1996.