Early Mod Marvels Monsters

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

If the “monstrous body is pure culture” as Jeffery Cohen has argued, then the literature of the monstrous inscribes the boundaries of culture, defining the normal through the deviant, the knowable through the marvelous, the socially and religiously acceptable through the prodigious and deformed. Starting with Beowulf (more medieval, of course, than Early Modern) and its cultural doppelganger Grendel, that founding monster of English literature, this course lays out a geography of medieval and Renaissance English culture through a reading of the marginal and the monstrous. Besides Beowulf, readings include Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a text in which the monstrous becomes a late medieval gomen. From there (some ground rules of monstrosity established), the remaining readings are organized into categories of so-called monstrosity: 1) the first takes on the Jew as monstrous, and includes the Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale,” a retelling of the Blood Libel, and Marlowe’s Jew of Malta; 2) a second looks at the peril of the transgressive-feminine, as bounded by “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” and the Shakespearian sonnets of the sexualized dark lady; 3) a third group makes an approach to Early Modern representations of blackness through readings of Othello and Oroonoko; 4) and a fourth group begins with Richard III, but also includes Bacon’s short essay “On Deformity,” and selections from two of Montaigne’s essays that began to naturalize the apparently “monstrous.” The class ends with a reading of Gulliver’s Travels whose eighteenth-century satire conflates the marvelous and monstrous in a way that challenges the beliefs of the Early Modern period and shows little faith in those of the Enlightenment.