ENGL 009R. First-Year Seminar: Grendel’s Workshop

This course will be a study of several traditional literary texts and of modern reshapings of these old stories into new artistic forms. Pairings of old and new will include various versions of Cinderella/Ashputtle, Little Red Riding Hood, Beowulf and Gardner’s Grendel, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. There will be both critical and creative writing assignments in the class.

John Gardner rewrote the ancient epic Beowulf in modern idiom from the monster’s viewpoint. Tom Stoppard showed us what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were up to offstage in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Angela Carter’s Red Riding Hood was fascinated by the company of wolves. Students will study old texts and their modern revisions and then write both critical papers about the them and also, using the re-telling models as starting points, reshape their own beautiful or beastly visions in creative writing forms. Here are some retelling slants: What is the story of the rat in Cinderella who is turned into a coachman? What is Ophelia dreaming in Hamlet as she slides into the netherworld of drowning and death? What is the mute lullaby which Grendel’s mother uses to sing him (or herself) to sleep in her underwater cave each night? What might the wolf in LRRH and Grendel have to say to one another over cappuccino in Kohlberg?
This First-year Seminar counts as both a Writing Class (W) and an English Dept. Creative Writing workshop.
Humanities
Writing course.
Fall 2022. Williamson.
Fall 2023. Williamson.
Fall 2024. Williamson.
Catalog chapter: English Literature
Department website: https://www.swarthmore.edu/english-literature

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