In the transition to the English (reception of the) Renaissance, late medieval literary treatment of the imagination constitutes a principal site for literary and textual self-reflection. On the one hand, the focal point of this engagement is the ambivalent nature of the imagination, for it is both a particular capacity that distinguishes the human being and a highly dangerous faculty that can become uncontrollable, affecting not only the human mind but from there the entire human body. On the other hand, the literary treatment of the imagination often takes the form of highly elaborate allegorical depictions with strong intertextual links. It thereby points to the heart of medieval conceptions of what would later be called literature.
Through close readings of paradigmatic texts from Chaucer’s House of Fame to the English mystic Margery Kempe, from Lydgate’s Temple of Glass to Hoccleve’s Complaint, this class aims at providing an introduction to late medieval English literature as well as its cultural contexts. Via depictions of the imagination, the texts we will be reading problematise such crucial issues as the place and power of literature and poetry, the affective dimension poetic language, ideas of how the process of the imagination works and how it relates to memory. But they also discuss questions of authorship as well as the status of literary texts being written in English.
The course seeks to complement the readings of the medieval texts with theoretical and historical approaches that should provide different accesses to the alterity of pre-Renaissance English culture and society. |
