Reading and Writing
About Sex and Power from Pre-Modern
to the Present
Univ. of S. Carolina ENGL 101
Course Description
Fall 2019
Entertainment such as Game of Thrones, Reign, the Borgias, or Shakespeare in Love often seeks to “modernize” and “spice up” the pre-modern period, providing exciting and dramatic scenes of intrigue, sex, and violence quite different from our high school memories of Ovid, Chaucer, or Shakespeare. In fact, to many students, the thought of reading medieval literature often sounds boring and irrelevant to modern-day concerns. This course, however, seeks to identify the more spectacular and surprising tales in the literature of the pre-modern period. In addition to learning how sex and power were as entertaining and fascinating to medieval readers as they are to modern audiences, students will also find that in some cases, late medieval literature is much more relevant to modern concerns than we think.
Objectives
Students will encounter topics such as masculinity on the battlefield, adultery in courtly love, defiant wives, domestic violence, origins of the “friend-zone” dilemma, transgender debates, and more. Rather than being at odds with modern notions of sex and power, these texts will show that medieval audiences were engaging in many forms of the same conversations in their own lives. The characters in these texts attempt to rationalize, engage, and at times defy the institutions that define their place in society—and often do so with a flair for the dramatic and sensational. Through writing assignments, students will be able to comment upon the assigned texts or introduce other pre-modern texts which they see as relevant to their current interests regarding sex and power that fall outside the purview of the list below. In addition, the inclusion of popular culture depictions in movies and television can provide for interdisciplinary pursuits and further engage students in the ethical debates pre-modern literature proposes. Sometimes humorous, sometimes serious, and sometimes tragic, the various struggles shown in the assigned readings will leave students amused, confused, outraged, and hopefully inspired to see the impact and relevance that pre-modern literary depictions of sex and power can still hold for modern readers.