Course module - Carnival and Tragedy
Code : ENGL32011 Credit rating: 20 Semester : 1
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Aims |
Objectives |
Assessment |
Information
|
Course Content |
Course Materials |
Tutors |
Timetable |
Teaching Methods |
Keywords
Aims
- To introduce students to a range of texts which involve discussion of tragedy and the carnivalesque, and the interrelationships between these two, and critical theories which engage with the concept of the tragic and carnival;
- To consider critical theory in the light of reading texts;
- To examine freshly a wide range of texts;
- To consider such concepts as folly (cp Erasmus, Foucault), the world turned upside down, and madness and heterogeneity, and what Bahktin calls ‘the tragedy of the single life’, and to historicise the concept of the monstrous, and the monstrous body; indeed, to historicise tragedy.
Objectives (Learning Outcomes)
By the end of this course, students should be able to:
- Relate to all the issues covered in an intelligent and articulate manner, and be able to contest views with other critically held positions;
- Ability to read and communicate that skill with enthusiasm and critical rigour.
Assessment
One 2,500-word essay (40%); one 2-hour unseen written exam (60%).
The use of dictionaries in the examination is prohibited. This rule applies to all categories of students, including all Visiting Students.
Information
THIS COURSE IS NOT AVAILABLE AS FREE-CHOICE.
Course Content
To contrast concepts of carnival with what Bakhtin calls ‘the tragedy of the individual life’, and to relate these concepts of carnival and tragedy in their historical manifestations to a reading of the early modern, looking at such topics as: the Utopian, the monstrous, madness, representations of the body, and, investigating Lacan’s sense of this being the moment of the birth of the modern subject, to explore such concepts as possessiveness and paranoia, as, alongside melancholia, shaping experiences of the tragic.
Course Materials
Tutor(s)
Tambling, Professor Jeremy
Timetable
PROVISIONAL TIMETABLE FOR 2013-2014
Tuesday 9:00 - 10:30
Wednesday 9:00 - 10:30
Please note that you must be able to attend both the Tuesday and Wednesday session to select this course unit.
Teaching Methods
3 hours of combined lecture/seminar
Preliminary reading
Students will be encouraged to read Foucault, The History of Madness, and Erasmus, Praise of Folly, and More’s Utopia, and work on Bakhtin, and on Nietzsche, the other theorist on the course, apart from Lacan. Use of Michael Bernstein, Bitter Carnival, and of Kristeva on the abject. Much use of painting: Bosch, Dürer, Breughel.
Texts include:
Euripides: The Bacchae
Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy
Rabelais: Book 2 (Pantagruel) from Gargantua and Pantagruel, and extracts from Bakhtin, Rabelais and his world
Cervantes: Exemplary Novels: including:
‘The Glass Graduate’
‘The Deceitful Marriage’ and ‘The Dialogue of the Dogs’
Don Quixote – first part
Shakespeare: Henry IV parts 1 and 2
Much Ado about Nothing
Othello
King Lear
Jonson: The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair
Racine: Phèdre.