Topics in Literature
Topic: Romance to Fantasy: or other worlding from Homer to NK Jemisin
Class Information
Instructor: Werth, Tiffany Jo
CRN: 32060
Time: MW 2:10-3:30
Location: 1344 Storer
GE Areas: Writing Experience
Description
Romance or, alternately, Fantasy is often used in literary and moral polemic to refer to kinds of stories conveying pleasure the critic thinks readers would do better to avoid. Castigated as dangerously seductive, shunned as escapist wish-fulfillment for a popular audience, the history of improbable narratives in English literature is complex. Spanning time from what has been called the fountainhead of romance, Homer's Odyssey, to recent bestsellers such as Philip Pullman's Golden Compass, and Nebula-award winning author NK Jemisin, this course charts the multiple, protean transformations and enduring appeal of fictitious narratives whose stories deny mimetic reality and range the limits of what Sir Philip Sidney called the zodiac of wit. Enchanted weapons, monsters, giants, threatened, and threatening women, deadly gardens, capricious seas, metamorphosis, travels to far flung shores, strange adventures, tourneys of combat and victory, the love of divers wandering princes and knights-errant will be the motifs we trace across centuries. Crossing geographical, genre, and species borders, the romance serves as a touchstone for larger questions of literary and cultural theory. To this end, this course will explore various definitions of romance and fantasy to conceptualize broader problems of genre, reception, media, and the ramifications of imaginative literature or speculative fiction. How do attitudes towards romance or fantasy register cultural mores regarding the marvelous and supernatural or to readerly pleasure. How does its imagined world project and mirror its historical moment even as it engages in an archetypal repertoire of narrative motifs.