Termine im WS 2012/13 - Englisches Seminar - Ruhr-Universität ...

050 629 McColl
The English Essay: Bacon to Orwell, 4 CP
2 st. mo 16-18 GABF 04/614 Süd
050 630 Walter, K.
What’s Love Got to Do With It? Affect, Ethics and Medieval Literature, 4 CP
2 st. di 10-12 GABF 04/253 Nord
Description: ‘We need to better flirt with and seduce each other, and -- hello? -- we
have to want to be seduced’. These words are taken, not from the pages of a glossy
magazine, but from a recent post by scholar, Eileen Joy; her topic is not relationship
self-help, but medieval scholarship. Flirtation, seduction, desire, love: what do these
have to do with scholarship? And what do they have to do with medieval literature in
particular? The medieval text, for many modern readers, is an object of the past, ripe
for objective historical study, giving access to a world in which people, ideas and
literature itself are not like our own. Recent trends, in particular what’s been termed
the ‘affective turn’ and the rise of the ‘new ethics’—not exclusive to but making their
mark decisively in literary studies—challenge this distancing, ‘othering’ stance to the
objects we study. In the past decade, the (partly economic) crisis in the universities
over the ‘value’ of literary study, events like 9/11 in the USA and those which followed
(war in Afghanistan, on terror, the indefinite detention of suspects in Guantanamo
Bay), have served to fuel the scholarly preponderance for ethically and affectivelyoriented
interpretations of literature, no less that of the Middle Ages than of other
periods.
This course will situate selected medieval texts in the context of the ‘affective turn’
and ‘new ethics’. It will combine readings from contemporary critical theory—
Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben—with medieval texts, ranging from
poetry and romance, treatises on chivalry and war, and sermons and homiletic
material. We will focus on topics such as love, ethics and reading, rhetoric and
exemplarity, and notions of political sovereignty and just war. We will consider both
how theory can illuminate the medieval, but also how ‘the medieval’ and its texts can
speak to our own political and moral preoccupations.
The primary texts required for this course will be made available through Blackboard.
Course Assessment: Further to attendance and active participation in class, this
course will be assessed through an essay submitted at the end of the course.