This course will engage students in a number of critical and analytical practices designed to help them appreciate the meanings of the body across humanistic and cultural studies. Reading the body into and out of texts drawn from literary, pictorial, electronic and digital sources, students will be led to see how their bodies are themselves transformed across time into visible fictions, hypertexts on which are inscribed a constantly changing narrative of imaging and desire. How that narrative was shaped by the divergent impulses of asceticism and self-indulgence will be illustrated with writings from St Paul and Augustine, with examples from medieval mysticism and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
All papers are due at class time on the dates indicated on the syllabus or otherwise announced.
Paper II and III should each be a minimum of 1000 words and a maximum of 1200 words. The topics for these papers will emerge from the materials and critical reflections you gather in your portfolios. Where portfolio materials are unsatisfactory, a standard paper topic may be assigned by me. Paper IV will consist of the original three pages of part one, and three new pages of exposition for part two, a total of six pages of exposition. Images and illustrations are additional.