ENG 4934 Spring 2025 - Fumo

Shapeshifters, monsters, hybrids, grotesques, and werewolves elicit fascination not just in today’s popular culture but in remote literary periods as well. This seminar explores metamorphosis, or radical transformation, in a variety of imaginative discourses. A favorite literary topic in classical antiquity, metamorphosis was moralized by medieval and early modern intellectuals, and its legacy surfaces in post-Enlightenment discourses of psychology and evolution. Our approach is broadly historical and comparative: it considers how notions of change are themselves transformed over time and across cultures. Working with literary texts in an interdisciplinary framework, we will treat metamorphosis as a cultural, artistic, and philosophical issue. Course materials pursue metamorphosis across English and European literary traditions (all foreign language materials will be read in translation), from the first century C.E. to the twenty-first, but we will dwell most extensively on the formative ancient, medieval, and early modern periods. Authors to be studied in depth include Ovid, Apuleius, Marie de France, Shakespeare, Franz Kafka, and Italo Calvino. No prior experience with these materials is expected, but seminar participants must be willing to read, analyze, and actively discuss an array of challenging texts of diverse genres and historical periods.