SCAN 259 - The Saga and Hybrid Culture (Spring 2008)

In this course we will conduct a study of six medieval Icelandic Sagas. We shall begin by establishing a premise. The hybridity of the cultural environment in which these sagas were written is discernable when we understand that these narratives depict a time that rests on the cusp of the Icelandic conversion to Christianity. It is just as important that we keep in mind that the sagas that we will read were written retrospectively, that is, they were written two to three hundred years after the "fact," and during a time when Icelandic independence was under threat. Therefore, it is only fitting that we begin our survey with an exploration of the 13th century Icelandic reconstruction of Old Norse belief systems. We will then turn to a heroic saga, which has its roots in a larger European tradition, and look at the specific Icelandic cast of this story. After that, we shall read a series of Icelandic "family" sagas, all set in Iceland, and attempt to understand both their cultural context and how they themselves contextualize cultural tensions. Readings include The Prose Edda, The Saga of the Völsungs, The Vinland Sagas, Egil's Saga, Njal's Saga, and Gisli Sursson's Saga.

HUM 300 - Monstrous Parallels: Rewriting Great Books (Winter 2008)

This course will consider the aesthetic and cultural implications of so-called parallel narratives—texts that rewrite other works of literature, often from the perspective of a minor character. The texts we will explore present their canonical sources from the perspective of a "monstrous" Other—the voice of the madwoman in the attic, the monster in the mere, or the bad witch are all used in late twentieth-century texts to get at something essential but overlooked in the original sources. Paired texts will likely include the following:

Beowulf (ca. 725, UK)/John Gardner. Grendel (1971, US)

Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre (1847, UK)/Jean Rhys. Wide Sargasso Sea (1966, UK)

L. Frank Baum. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900, US)/Gregory Maguire. Wicked (1995 US)

Elias Lönnrot. Kalevala (1849, Finland)/Johanna Sinisalo. Troll (2000, Finland)

Selections from the New Testament (Matthew 27:15-26; Mark 15:6-15; Luke 23:13-25; John 18:38-19:16)/Pär Lagerkvist. Barabbas (1950, Sweden)

Saxo Grammaticus. Gesta Danorum (ca. 1200, Denmark)/William Shakespeare. Hamlet (1602, UK)/Tom Stoppard. Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966, UK; also the 1990 film version).

SCAN 340 - Emergence of Nordic Cultures and Society (Winter 2008)

Explores the early history of the Nordic region from pre-Viking days to 1750. Includes Viking history, settlement patterns, material culture, language development, political systems, and belief systems. Conducted in English.

This course is intended to present a chronological overview of the most salient historical and cultural developments in the Nordic region. We will examine how Nordic identity as a separate entity from the rest of Europe was formulated, and how it changed as Nordic peoples came into contact with each other and with the peoples and belief systems of other regions. Emphasis is placed on the hybridity and diversity of the Nordic region during the period, and it aims to contextualize (and correct popular misconceptions about) the Viking age.

This course satisfies both the Arts and Letters and International Cultures requirements. it provides the student with a broadly inter-disciplinary understanding of the early development of the Nordic countries in contradistinction to their Christian neighbors. Our study will address geographical, historical, linguistic, religious, and ethical developments in the region, and as such, this course provides a deeper context for our introductory literary studies course that addresses the medieval literature of the North, Scandinavian 259.

353 Scandinavian Women Writers

Interaction between literature and society in fiction written by women. Readings range from 13th-century Icelandic sagas to works by contemporary authors. Readings and discussions in English.

United under the linked themes of memory and the construction of an imagined past, the fictional texts we will read this quarter will explore the landscape and interiors of Scandinavian women's experiences in the 19th and 20th centuries. We will read the Norwegian writer Cora Sandel's Alberte og Jakob (1926), the Danish writer Isak Dinesen's (pseudonym for Karen Blixen) Out of Africa (1937), and the Swedish writer Kerstin Ekman's Blackwater (1996), as well as a number of short prose texts by other Scandinavian writers, with an eye to exploring how the topographies they create function in the texts. Building on ideas originally propounded by Virginia Woolf in her ubiquitous work A Room of One's Own (1929), in which she argues that questions of economics, personal autonomy, and the occupation of a particular type of space are inextricably linked to the successful production of literature, we will in this class examine how the literary construction of space by women writers changes over time, as well as how those spaces are inflected both in terms of class, gender, and in some instances race.