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09/04 - 12/20 | ||||||
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6:00 pm |
Subject: English (Grad) (GENG)
CRN: 42552
Lecture
St Paul: O'Shaughnessy Education Center 212
J.R.R. Tolkien, an Oxford professor and eminent medievalist, is best known for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, works that have been popular since they were first published. One of Tolkien’s distinctive contributions to fantasy writing lies in the example he set as a builder of worlds. Fantasy and science-fiction novelists, game designers, and role-play enthusiasts all acknowledge Tolkien as a master in the art of constructing a universe with its own history and geography, flora and fauna, cultures and languages, magic and physics. Tolkien rooted his fictional works in the language and traditions of the Anglo-Saxon, Norse, Gothic, and Celtic cultures that he studied as a medievalist. The class examines his major, seminal fantasy fictions through these cultures, traditions, and languages alongside the theories he himself developed of fantasy world-building. The labor of creating Middle-earth, in its various phases, revisions and versions, has become a subject of study, to which much academic attention has been devoted. Questions that guide this class are: What are the implications and ramifications of the act of worldbuilding, especially as it was conceived and practiced by Tolkien? How do we situate Tolkien's creation within the context of Tolkien’s work as both artist and medievalist and alongside its medieval sources and modern parallels, the uses of tradition, the nature of history and its relationship to place? What does Tolkien’s work teach us about storytelling, art and imagination? How are Tolkien’s works repurposed in modern media (a children’s play, spoken word poetry, visual art, film, radio, song cycle, Aubusson tapestries, dialect literature and YouTube videos)? This course fulfills the early British literature distribution requirement.
3 Credits