ENG 351 - Beowulf

Deep study in the original language of the most well-known of Old English secular literature, the epic/elegy Beowulf. This course gives equal attention to the work both as literature and language. The course explores the work as ‘literary’: a self-contained and transhistoric “text,” one with self-referential value, but also as a cultural document–that is, as the product of a particular kind of pre-/newly-Christian Northern European society, possibly drawing upon a long tradition of Germanic literary models, and the result of perhaps several different periods of literary accretion/communal composition. Additionally, as a poetic text in a foreign language, the course demands extensive translation of the work, including detailed linguistic and prosodic analysis.

Prerequisite: ENG 332 - Old English or equivalent.
Credit(s): 4
Course Attribute(s):

Honors Scholar Course.
Arts & Humanities Perspectives course for the Dialogues.