Courses

The later English Middle Ages bear witness to an astonishingly intense period of literary experimentation. Almost all this experimentation is in poetry; nonrhythmic prose is not a coherent medium (with cultural prestige, genres, and so on) in literary English composition until after the invention of the printing press in about 1450. The experimental impulse originates from a fundamental ling. change: in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest (1066), French poetic practices collide with Anglo-Saxon practices to produce the first flowering of Middle English poetry. New forms arise both in narrative and lyric poetry and in both religious and secular contexts, though one upshot of the experimental energy of the period is that both of these oppositions—narrative versus lyric, religious versus secular—are examined and reinvented by the end of the Middle Ages, particularly in the large-scale narrative fictions of the major poets of Edwardian, Ricardian, and Lancastrian England.

In this course, we’ll read some of the most prominent and influential of these poetic experiments—including Piers Plowman, some of Chaucer’s works, the Confessio amantis, and some late medieval verse dramas. We’ll be thinking at all turns about how these poems encounter literary tropes, forms, traditions, and problems, and how they device formal and thematic ways of addressing, reshaping, and sometimes radically reinventing those problems for a new, emerging vernacular readership in the Late Middle Ages.

But we will pair these experimental poems, throughout the semester, with more obviously experimental poetry—poems written in the late 20th and early 21st century by American and Canadian writers. Indeed, when we think of “experimental” poetry, we often reflexively think of contemporary poetic works, works that are experimental with comparison to current literary conventionality. In this class, we will try to think with but also beyond historical situatedness, since our juxtaposition of medieval and contemporary poetry will reveal not only how experimentation is historically conditioned, but also how it sometimes attains its most iconoclastic height precisely by doing a kind of formal or thematic work that seems, somehow, transhistorical, or at least historically nonspecific. To promote this kind of transhistorical thinking, I’ve divided our readings into five sections, each of which represents a rich vein of experimental ore, both in the late Middle Ages and in the contemporary American/Canadian literary landscape.