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SoSe 21: PS-Medieval English Literatures: Why Love Hurts in Medieval and Early Modern Troy Stories

Margitta Rouse

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This seminar is about Otherness redoubled and refracted. What does it mean to love another – and what does it mean to fail at being in love with another? If this is a tricky question for us contemporaries to answer, it must seem impossible to comprehend tragic love described more than 600 years ago. And then there are even older stories, that of Aeneas and Dido, a romance gone sour, because Aeneas must leave Dido to found Italy, as described, for example, by ancient Roman poet Virgil. Or there is the story of faithful Lucretia who is raped yet must lose her life for her loyalty to her husband, famously told by Roman poet Ovid. These were the kind of stories that medieval writers were fascinated by, and they also inform the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. What does it mean now to engage with such stories of former times, and what did it mean then, to retell stories of lovers who lose it all in times long gone? What does it mean to imagine life imagined in times lost then and now?

We will focus our investigations on three texts by two of the most celebrated writers of the English-speaking world, Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare. We begin with a short dream poem by Chaucer, The Book of the Duchess; move on to his longer narrative poem Troilus and Criseyde and close with Shakespeare’s early poem The Rape of Lucrece. These texts are connected not only because they imagine ancient lovers, or because they imagine lovers imagining lovers; they are also connected in that they seek inspiration from the story that epitomizes the idea of love gone wrong like no other: the story of the fall of Troy. Both Chaucer and Shakespeare build their own stories around the story of how a war was launched after the Trojans abducted beautiful Helen. Or did she perhaps want to come? Was the war perhaps her fault, all along?

This seminar sets out to introduce you to the fascinating world of medieval and early modern literature and language. The majority of our sessions will be devoted to close readings of our set texts, paying particular attention to the various aesthetic, political, and social functions of stories of hurtful love intersecting with the story of Troy.

Please note: This course will be taught online only; for web-based discussions you will need Internet access in a quiet environment, a webcam and ideally a headset. Further information will be provided at the beginning of class via Blackboard; however do not hesitate to contact me by email (m.rouse@fu-berlin.de) if you have questions regarding this course and/or technical requirements before the semester begins.