James Simpson

Across the period 700-1700 the shapes of British culture were absorbed from different centers of Western Europe. These cultural forms are conflicted among themselves, and conflicted across time. This course will delineate the principal cultural forces (e.g. religious, political, social) that shaped England in particular. We will look to the ways in which those vibrant yet opposed forces find expression in the shape, or form, of literary works.

Across the period 700-1700 the shapes of British culture were absorbed from different centers of Western Europe. These cultural forms are conflicted among themselves, and conflicted across time. This course will delineate the principal cultural forces (e.g. religious, political, social) that shaped England in particular. We will look to the ways in which those vibrant yet opposed forces find expression in the shape, or form, of literary works.

Images find a very direct way into the depths of the psyche; they provoke both love and fear. Through literary texts, we examine the function of images from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, in both erotic and religious traditions.

What is the function of literary texts in moments, from Plato to the Russian Revolution, that promise total, enlightened societal transformation? A hypothesis: literary texts do not participate easily in the new order. Literary texts are more divided in their sympathies; they recognize the value of the past order; they reveal the ways in which the repressed past resurfaces. They resist the textual simplicities of philosophy. Which do we believe: philosophy, or literature?

A chance to read from four rich periods: Anglo-Saxon literature (unrivaled in the Europe of its time for power and sophistication); Anglo-Norman writing (Tristan and Isolde); the late fourteenth-century (where Chaucer’s is not the only exceptionally rewarding oeuvre); and from Spenser to Milton, including Shakespeare en route.