Not a survey in the historical sense, but an exploration of issues and controversies in medieval studies. Landmark literary works from a variety of genres will be juxtaposed with both medieval and contemporary theoretical texts, and with relevant critical essays, to evaluate both the questions we ask of medieval texts and the answers we find. How do we read the gender roles and power politics encoded in the literature of courtly love, for example? C. S. Lewis argued in 1936 that medieval courtly love idealized women and refined men. Contemporary feminist, psychoanalytic, and queer theorists would offer strikingly different perspectives. How might these different perspectives affect our reading of The Romance of the Rose, the most influential courtly love poem of the Middle Ages? How do we read the status of language in a period keenly aware of the gulf between God's Word and human words, Truth and fiction? How do deconstructionist theories about the inadequacy of language compare to medieval theories? And what relevance do these have to a reading of the General Prologue of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales-a work in which the narrator is obsessed almost to paralysis with both divine Truth and poetic truth? Other works and topics we might consider are chivalric ideals in an Arthurian romance: what exactly are knights questing for in Chretien's Yvain, The Knight with the Lion? How helpful are the suggestions of queer theory and Marxist theory? Saints' lives and/or the Book of Margery Kempe: what are we to make of the extremes of holiness in an era that elevated hysterics into saints and ostracized saints as social misfits? The goal of the course is to introduce students to some landmark works of medieval literature and, more importantly, to a variety of critical ways to think about them. Format: lecture/discussion. Requirements: frequent short electronic journal postings, two 6- to 8-page papers, and a final exam. Prerequisite: a 100-level English course, except 150. Enrollment limit: 25 (expected 15). Preference to English and Comp/Lit Studies majors and qualified non-majors. (Pre-1700 or Criticism)