problems in the literary representation of the past
DR. RACHEL WAMSLEY
rachel.wamsley@mail.huji.ac.il
ENGLISH 44809, M.A. SEMINAR, 2 PTS MONDAYS 16.30-18.15
This course investigates the use of literary and linguistic realism in the evocation of the historical past. From the Middle English crusading romance, Richard Coeur de Lion, to Hilary Mantel’s 2009 historical novel Wolf Hall, this course will examine how literary representations of the past adopt a language historically removed from that of the reader, even as they invite the reader’s intimate identification with temporally distant narratives, characters, and cultures. Close readings of literary and theoretical texts will illuminate how language and rhetoric serve to inflect the reader's experience of narrative time and historical distance. Rejecting verisimilitude as a measure of the success of literary realism, we will explore how archaism, anachronism, nostalgia, and irony are activated in the literary reimagining of the past.