FILM 241 - Cinema Arthuriana

ENGL 241 FDR: HL Literature Distribution
Credits: 3

Prerequisite: completion of FDR:FW requirement. This course is a survey of Arthurian films and an introduction to film studies. We will read select premodern and modern texts and examine a variety of films across the twentieth• and the twenty-first centuries. The course begins with Arthur the messianic hero, then proceeds to the romance of the Holy Grail, the tribulations of Gawain, and finally the American repurposing of matters of Arthur. H film is an escapist medium, it is first and foremost a mirror to society that reflects its cultural fantasies and structural imaginaries. We will consider forms of medievalism and forces of ideology and periodization that these films embody and project, as well as reception theories and on our own historical contingencies.