ENGL 315 - Arthurian Bodies, Desires, and Affects

FDR: HL Literature Distribution
Credits: 3

Prerequisite: an English course numbered between 201 and 295 and another English course numbered between 222 and 299. During the medieval and early modern periods, King Arthur and his court served as the foundational models of courtly love, chivalry, and political discourse in the West. Yet artists have rendered Arthurian personae as bodies that feel deeply and follow the pull of desires, and in so doing, produce counter subjectivities. This course surveys the premodern Arthurian literary traditions through theoretical lenses grounded in women’s, queer, and trans studies. We examine the myths of Arthur’s heroic masculinity and Camelot, the adulterous love triangle at the heart of courtly love, the uncanny trans embodiment and queer sensibility of knighthood, the marriage plot, the uneven gendering of negative affects, the trans-species borders of the animal and the human, and alternate forms of sociality.