Kristin Bovaird-Abbo
English 203: The Quest for the Grail – Course Description
The grail has evolved over the centuries; in its early
stages, it was simply a platter, sometimes a stone. Occasionally it had magical powers, but not
always. A wounded old man, the Fisher
King, was frequently associated with the grail, and his health subsequently
determined the health of the land. Yet
somewhere along the way the grail transformed into a holy relic – the vessel
which caught the blood of Jesus on the cross.
And the Church neither sanctioned nor condemned it. This class would examine some of the earliest
appearances of the grail, and then look at modern reinterpretations of the
grail legend, particularly in relation to the two world wars, where the grail
quest was used to express the angst and frustration and utter despair of the
soldiers in the trenches. A possible
text is James Joyce’s Dubliners, in
which the grail legend (as seen in Parzival) is used very subtly to become the vehicle of
criticism for the Catholic church in
We will also discuss modern films, such a Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Excalibur, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and The Fisher King. Excalibur offers a pagan view of the grail, equating the king with the land, while Indiana Jones depicts the Nazi’s quest thwarted by that dashing hero, Jones himself. The Fisher King approaches the grail legend through the mind of a mentally unstable man.
Major assignments will include a course journal and three papers.
Required texts:
The Mabinogion Victorian Poetry (C. Rossetti, Tennyson, etc.)
Wolfram Von Eschenbach, Parzival WWI and WWII Poetry (S. Sassoon, T. S. Eliot, etc.)
Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur James Joyce, Dubliners
Other materials will be available either online or at the reserve desk in Watson Library.
Aaron Profitt
Proposed Title: Detective Fiction
Description: For spring ’04 I should like to teach another section of Detective Fiction. At this point, I do not know what texts I would use, as I will almost certainly change the focus of the course, at least slightly. I will again use several novels and a short-story anthology, and my focus will likely still be on that particularly rich period from the late nineteenth century to the mid twentieth. I also would likely retain some authors, particularly Christie and Stout, possibly Hammet and March. Otherwise I would choose different texts to give a different focus to the course. Possible focuses include: use of “stock” characters (the Anglo-Indian officer, the little old lady, the tight-lipped PI, the blonde/brunette/redhead in distress, the sneering master criminal, the heavy-booted Yard man, etc.); “the ones that got away” (uncaught, unpunished or self-punished criminals); crimes of place (works set in particular and detailed settings, both fictional and real, such as the Tower of London, Charleston, New York City, the Nile River, but also vague regions of England, New Zealand, the U. S. etc.); methods of murder (explorations of varying means of murder, including poisoning and locked-room, of course, but seeing how many I could include). My proposal is not more specific in part because I want to see how the fall ’03 section goes, with its twin focuses on historical development of the genre and engagement with social issues and change, and some of my changes will doubtless be guided by that.
Texts: A mystery to me . . .