Dr. Jo Koster

228 Bancroft Hall

803-323-4557

kosterj@winthrop.edu
Office Hours: and by appointment

ENGL 321: Modern Arthurian Literature and Film
Summer 2006: Maymester

Texts:   T. H. White, The Once and Future King
            Kevin J. Harty, Cinema Arthuriana 2^nd edition
            Elizabeth McMahan et al. The Elements of Writing about Literature
                 and Film
            Online material : http://faculty.winthrop.edu/kosterj/engl321.htm
            One out-of-class movie rental

Goals:  

·        Students will be able to summarize the historical development of the Arthurian legend in literature

·        Students will connect modern literary critical viewpoints with Arthurian literature

·        Students will recognize and identify major Arthurian themes and motifs used in 20^th century film

·        Students will connect material discussed in class with their independent reading and viewing project.

·        Students will improve their media literacy and their ability to critically view films.

·        Students will reflect their understanding in various written and oral forms (papers, presentations, class discussion, critiques, essay exams).

·        Students will be able to articulate why First Knight is one of the worst Arthurian movies ever made.

See a complete listing of course goals for the Department of English at http://www.winthrop.edu/english/goals/index.htm. Goals for teacher certification majors are listed at http://www.winthrop.edu/english/goals.htm#englished.

Course calendar: http://faculty.winthrop.edu/kosterj/engl321/calendar06.htm

Grading and Assignments:

Grading Standards:

In this class, 91+ = A; 81-90 = B; 71-80 = C; 61-70 = D; below 61 = F. You must turn in all assignments in the class to pass the course.

Movie Preparation and Discussion Assignments

This assignment counts for 10% of your final grade. Beginning in the second week of the class, you will be assigned (in teams of 2 or 3) to prepare a Film Preview Sheet for the next film we will be watching in class. (I will give you models of these for the first two films we watch together.) At a minimum, these sheets should include

• Film production information (director, producer, studio, principal actors, date of release, IMDB links—the info you would need for a full MLA citation of the film and the DVD or VHS release)
• Names of major characters
• Summary of major critical responses to the film
• Link to online script or film information site (if such exists)
• References to at least two scholarly discussions of the film outside what we are reading for class that you think would help people who might write about this film
• Preview questions for the film (two or three major questions you think people might want to keep in mind as they watch the film)
• Other useful information about the film
  
   

You must e-mail the preview to the class before class meets on the day assigned. (We will circulate these by e-mail because it will keep the links “live” and save people from retyping long URLs to retrieve material.)

Then, on the day after we watch the film, each team will be responsible for leading a 30-45 minute discussion of the film and its connection to literature [i.e., the questions should not be along the lines of “Who is cuter, Ioan Grufudd or Clive Owen?”]. You should plan this discussion, have questions prepared, and think of ways to get us involved in the discussion. If you wish, you may show clips from the movie to help stimulate the discussion, but there is a maximum of 15 minutes of clips—we are supposed to be talking, not re-watching the movie.

Weekend Critique Assignments

Each of these assignments is worth 15% of your final grade. For each question, you will be required to write a short paper (4-6 pp. exclusive of Works Cited) that answers a particular question about the previous week’s reading and viewing. [The kinds of questions posed will be models for the kinds of questions you will be doing for your long critique so that you’ll get a feel of how you might conceptualize, focus, and structure your longer paper. The papers will be assigned at the end of class on Thursday and due at the beginning of class on the following Monday. You should upload each paper into the appropriate file in our course file on www.turnitin.com before class on the due date. Our class ID # is 1521781 and our class password is galahad.

These assignments may require you to go back and review a film we’ve watched in class, to follow up readings, scripts, and links on a Film Preview, and to go to the standard online bibliographies and source material. Any materials from any of these sources should be correctly documented in MLA style. However, they are not “research papers”—i.e. the goal is for you to answer the question posed, not for you to go find out what everyone else in the history of literary and film criticism has said about this question.

Long Critique of Connections

Your major project for this course (worth 25% of your grade) is to take a question about the Arthurian legend and compare how that question is answered in a literary (or literary critical) work and a modern film work. It might be a question about a theme, a character, or a critical approach—that choice is up to you. You should choose your combination from the list below, but I am open to appeals for other combinations if and only if you make them by the end of the first week of Maymester. You’ll need to start this project now, since you may have to get material on Interlibrary Loan or obtain films through a rental service like Blockbuster or Netflix (both of these have free two-week online subscriptions available through their websites if you choose to use that means of obtaining films). I have copies of many of the books involved and will be glad to loan them out on a first-come, first-served basis.

Your task is to pose (and refine) your question, examine your text and film very carefully, and then create a critical argument (that means you need a thesis beyond “Lancelot is in both of these works”) that answers your question. Use whatever outside sources you need to support your argument; the class website has links to major Arthurian bibliographies that will save you a great deal of time in getting started. The response paper should be 7-10 pp. doublespaced, perfectly documented in MLA form, and submitted at the beginning of our final class meeting in hard copy as well as uploaded to www.turnitin.com. You will also present your conclusions as a 15-minute oral report on the penultimate day of class (and may, if you choose, show video clips illustrating your conclusions) during the presentation.

I will ask you to write down your question and your chosen combination of works for me by Friday, May 19 in class.

Combinations of Literature and Film for Final Project

T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Gilliam’s The Fisher King

Walker Percy’s Lancelot and Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac

Fuqua’s King Arthur and one of Bernard Cornwell’s Arthurian novels, the best of which for this purpose would be Enemy of God or Excalibur

Fuqua’s King Arthur and Rosemary Sutcliff’s Sword at Sunset

Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon and the TV movie of the book (note: Mists is 900+ pages long. Don’t choose this topic if you haven’t already read the book once.)

Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology [the Grail section], and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

White’s The Once and Future King and either the TV movie Merlin or Camelot

Thomas Berger’s Arthur Rex and Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Malory’s Tales of King Arthur and His Knights and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (if you have a background in 19^th century lit)

C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength and Boorman’s Excalibur

John Heath-Stubbs’ Artorius and Boorman’s Excalibur

Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and Knightriders

HOW TO WATCH A FILM

( adapted by Dr K from a handout by Dr. Daniel A. MacLeay, Southeast Missouri State University, available at http://www2.semo.edu/foreignlang/advice.html )

You may never have thought about watching films as an intellectual act, but this class requires not only that you think about what you watch, but also that you learn to understand and articulate your reaction to films as a critic. That will be key to allowing you to write about them well, and that’s a big percentage of your grade this semester. So to get you out of “popcorn” mode for viewing these modern Arthurian films, I recommend the following strategies. I have also ordered McMahan et al.’s The Elements of Writing about Literature and Film as a supporting text for this class. Chapter 4, “Analyzing Film,” will help you identify the elements you may focus on and give you a clear set of terms to describe what you see in the films.

I. PREPARATION

1. Find out as much as you can about a film before you see it. Who made the film, where and when was it made, for what audience it was intended, what was its critical reception and what kind of film is it considered to be? One of the best resources is the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com), which assembles a great deal of material for you, including credits, bloopers, and information on the director and key actors. Both the Harty and the Torregrossa bibliographies have lots of information on the reception of these works; use these bibliographies in conjunction with the library databases to get a good sense of what’s been said about the films. Your Film Preview assignment will help you and your classmates approach your films.

2. Approach this information carefully and skeptically. In reading critics' analyses, note how the critics analyze the film. Do they talk about performances (acting), character/plot development (screenwriting), visual style (cinematography and direction), sexual/political/moral points of view (ideology)? What are their agendas? What’s different between the way film critics and literary critics approach each film?

3. Be aware of what your expectations are. Think about what you should pay attention to in the film according to the information you have gotten. Try to isolate the elements of the composition and see them as they contribute to the whole.

4. Do not bring prejudices and hard opinions to a viewing; be open to different approaches. A work of art challenges convention rather than pandering to it. An alert, open mind with good information is necessary to your experience.

II. VIEWING THE FILM

1. Come to the film alert, attentive and ready to think, even if you’ve seen it already. You are watching the film to analyze, understand and appreciate its perspective on the Arthurian legend, so watch it in that frame of mind. Make yourself a chart or check sheet so that you can take notes about things like cinematography, costuming, casting, characterization, dialogue, music, etc. You may wish to bring the list of characters and key quotes from the IMDB in to class with you so that you can scribble on them as you watch. From your preparation, make yourself a list of four or five key questions/issues you want to watch for in the film (for instance, “Fuquay said he wanted to make a movie about King Arthur that was close to the historical truth. How does he represent 5^th century Britain in the movie?”) You can start with the questions posed on the preview sheet, but you should go further.

2. Take notes to aid your memory and to highlight insights or questions about the film. You may not have a chance to watch the film again or analyze scenes from the film (although feel free to rent it for yourself and review it). You cannot depend on your memory to provide the details necessary for analysis. (You can get a free two-week subscription for movie rentals at www.netflix.com or www.blockbuster.com, but you’ll need to give a credit card number and watch the cut-off date if you don’t want to end up paying a gazillion dollars for rentals.)

3. If something strikes you as unusual, unexpected, or flat-out eccentric, try to decipher it in the context of the film. Dismissing what you do not understand or accept is a sign that you have not done your job as a critic. Often you’ll be able to find an interview with the director, actors, or production staff that explains why some element of a film is there—it’s your job to look for those reasons before you decide whether the element works.

4. The credits are instructive. Watch them (and double-check against the IMDB credits). It’s amazing what you learn from them, including the person responsible for Miss Taylor’s mooses.

5. I will try to allow some “quiet time” immediately after the viewing for you to review your notes and flesh them out while your memory of the film is sharpest. This fresh impression may not always be the most thoughtful, but your immediate reaction is useful. Following that, if time permits, we’ll discuss the film; if not, we’ll begin the next class with film discussion. The writers of each prep sheet will begin the discussion of the film for us.