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| Merlin is the pre-eminent magician of the British Isles,
where he appears in many literary genres and modes
beginning with early Welsh poetry; ranges through medieval
chronicle and legendary history; enters into Tennyson's
vast Victorian epic; and makes it in twentieth-century
fantasy literature, cartoons, and films. Travelling in
"high" and "low" cultural forms, this wizard plays multiple
roles: teacher of King Arthur, architect of Stonehenge,
counsellor to the knights of the Round Table, lecherous
dotard, anti-Christ, prophet of the fortunes of Britain,
bard, and hallucinating wild man of the woods.
This class will examine the ways Merlin recurs as a potent figure -- one who transforms the separate cultures and ethnicities of the British Isles into a single Englishness, and so becomes not merely a figure for, but an agent of, English national identity; one who, in his broader European permutations, is a type of the madman/magician figure; one who, for all his proto-scientific mastery of the world of nature, becomes enthralled by that world, represented as the feminine; and one who, as a shape-shifting and spell-casting magus, exemplifies imaginative transformation itself. Among the questions the course will pose are: how are fantasies about Merlin and his medieval setting used to advance cultural and poltical agendas? what does laying claim to the figure of Merlin authorize one to suggest about its national past and future? What place can there be for women in a world comprehended by Merlin? |
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http://www.princeton.edu/~sma/pucourse/eng300/main.shtml |