Instr:                   José Lanters
Office:                CRT 487,   229-4540
e-mail:                lanters@uwm.edu
Office hours:    by appointment

Course Information:                     Tuesdays    4:30-7:10   CRT 466
 

Course Description

This course examines modern English literature (fiction, poetry, drama) that directly or indirectly uses myth (fable, legend) or a mythical method. Myths have a universal and a culture-specific aspect. On the one hand, they deal with the unchangeable nature of human beings; on the other hand, they reveal the cultural patterns of the specific societies that produced them. Myths impose order and purpose on human experience; they function as cultural bonding agents, or cautionary tales. As such, they often justify the present and rationalize the status quo: myths are a conservative force that discourages radical social change. Richard Kearney, among others, has argued that myth is a two-way street: myth as a closed product which draws a magic circle around a fixed identity; and myth as an open-ended process which frees us from the strait-jacket of fixed identity. The writers in this course, in different ways, engage with this double-edged quality of myth, and operate on the faultline of “those mythic sedimentations from our past and those mythic aspirations for our future which challenge our present sense of ourselves, which disclose other possibilities of being.”

Assessment:
class presentation, class participation, final paper (20 pp.).

Books (provisional list):
Marina Carr, Plays 1
Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop and Fireworks
Brian Friel, Plays 2
Seamus Heaney, Sweeney Astray and Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996
Ted Hughes, New Selected Poems
Doris Lessing, The Memoirs of a Survivor
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children and Shame
Jeanette Winterson, The Passion