From shipwrecks to pirates, from the discovery of unknown lands to reunions with long-lost lovers, the state of being lost has long vexed protagonists and inspired authors. In this module, we’ll explore loss and being lost as fundamental conditions of both the production, and interpretation, of narrative in the Renaissance. Focusing especially on romance, that nebulous and unwieldy form, we’ll consider what the fictional representation of ‘wrong turns’ (literal and metaphorical) tells us about early modern story-telling, ethics, and New World exploration.
We’ll therefore contextualize our examination of early modern literary texts with readings from historical accounts of voyages and cross-cultural encounters and explore how being lost would have been both a familiar literary convention inherited from the ancient and medieval worlds and a condition made newly meaningful in light of expansive global discoveries. We’ll be attentive too to our own position as readers lost – in good ways and bad – in such texts, and how being lost might structure, or hinder, learning and the acquisition of knowledge.
Occurrence | Teaching period |
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A | Autumn Term 2022-23 |
This module aims to introduce students to the centrality of ‘being lost’ as a literary and intellectual phenomenon in the Renaissance and to familiarize students with the genre of romance and its indebtedness to epic and travel narrative. We’ll do that by exploring the value of reading across literary and non-literary texts and to reading with an eye to historical context. Finally, the module aims to cultivate an attentiveness to our own habits and practices of reading narrative - to our experiences of being lost in books.
On successful completion of this module students should be able to
Task | Length | % of module mark |
---|---|---|
Essay/coursework 3000 word essay |
N/A | 100 |
None
You will be given the opportunity to hand in a 1000 word formative essay in the term in which the module is taught (usually in the week 7 seminar). Material from this essay may be re-visited in your summative essay and it is therefore an early chance to work through material that might be used in assessed work. This essay will be submitted in hard copy and your tutor will annotate it and return it two weeks later (usually in your week 9 seminar). Summary feedback will be uploaded to your eVision account. All students will have the opportunity to give an in-class individual presentation during a seminar in weeks 2-9.
Task | Length | % of module mark |
---|---|---|
Essay/coursework 3000 word essay |
N/A | 100 |