November 2024 Modules

Welcome to the Readings in Poetry page for the Advanced Old English Series in which students explore, in alternating months, a work of prose and then a work of poetry to introduce students to the breadth and depth of Old English texts available for study. Each month Dr. Swain surveys the group to see what they want to tackle next from month to month.

Wands at the ready, let's read the fourth Harry Potter book!

We will get together twice a week to explore the series, reading through the books at a relaxed pace. Connect with fellow readers and share your insights as we discover (or rediscover) the magic.

Over two months, we will follow fourteen-year-old Harry's adventures as he is forced to compete in the deadly Triwizard Tournament. But who entered him in the tournament, and why? The answers will reveal the dark forces poised to destroy the wizarding world...

This book club is all about sharing the moments of unexpected, joyful discovery through close reading. Focusing on the text, we will share our personal readings and experiences. We will learn from our classmates in a kindness-first, supportive environment.

Together, we can tackle some big questions about the series. What was it about the Harry Potter books that resonated with so many people? To what extent is it possible or indeed desirable to separate art from artist?

Most of all, however, we will have an inclusive dialogue that embraces a multiplicity of views and enriches our experience of the text.

Note: Though this module is open to all who have a mature writing project ready for close scrutiny, we strongly recommend that students participating in this module will have completed at least 4 previous modules in the Year of the Novel sequence.

You’ll spend this month building on all the skills you’ve learned through the Creative Writing: Workshop modules by reading each other’s nearly completed novels. Now you’ve built a community of encouragement and good communication and have a deep familiarity with each other’s projects & styles: so, whether you’re copy editing or madly layering in a gamma plot, lean into the group for collaborative feedback to bring this novel to fruition.

Collaborative Feedback: A method of supportive feedback which lifts up excellence and encourages your own story in your own voice. You will read and comment kindly on others’ work as well as having the option to share your own writing (which we very much hope you will do). For more information, check out our video here.

We will meet to blend learning, discussion, and playing games with reading, appreciating, and commenting on one another’s work as it is submitted for peer review. Writers are encouraged—but never required—to submit new pieces in any state of draftiness or readiness up to 2,000 words each week for peer reading and feedback. Our Collaborative Feedback method, developed here at Signum University, asks us to comment at the author's comfort level through a structured reader (not editor) response. We gather to encourage the story that the author wants to tell. Our philosophy of kindness first might just turn around your previous experience of writing groups.

Note: For more information about the Collaborative Feedback Method in SPACE, please check out our video here.

The Hieroglyphics series will present students with a basic understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphs, grammar, and knowledge about how to proceed with further study. In this sequence of courses we will discuss how to translate steles that you are likely to encounter in museums, as well as their cultural significance. As student progress, the class will tackle more complex translation. Each one-month module builds on the previous one, so students ready to learn Hieroglyphics will communicate with our Director and Professor Gaffney to make the right placement for everyone.

This course offers an in-depth look at the first complete “historical” narrative of the reign of King Arthur, Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Britanniae. Almost a quarter of the total work, this crucial first account of Arthur includes Arthur’s magically-contrived conception, his conquest of Rome, and his overthrown and death at the hands of his nephew Mordred. This course also looks at the “battle of books” that followed in the wake of Geoffrey’s work, with some contemporaries arguing that Geoffrey simply made the whole thing up, and others rallying to Geoffrey’s (and Arthur’s) defense.

The module will follow an 8-session structure as shown below:

Outline	8-Session Structure
Week 1	Lecture 1: The “Historical” Arthur before Geoffrey
	Discussion 1: HRB, Prologue and Book VI: Britain in Chaos
Week 2	Lecture 2: Merlin the Historian: Prophesy as History and Vice-Versa
	Discussion 2: HRB, Book VIII: Death of a Tyrant; The Birth of a Hero
Week 3	Lecture 3: The Anarchy of Stephen: The Politics of Geoffrey’s Early Readership
	Discussion 3: HRB, Books IV – X: The Rise and Fall of King Arthur
Week 4	Lecture 4: The Battle of the Books: Geoffrey’s Contested History
	Discussion 4: HRB, Books XI – XII: Goodbye Britain, Hello England!

This course is for those who have an interest in Japanese culture and wish to continue our study of Japanese. We will continue using Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji, and covering grammatical structures. Through use of conversational Japanese, we will continue to explore how the language is used in anime, manga, and music.

Japanese is a language of great nuance and depth. This module will open the door to that world and build a foundation for greater insight into Japan's culture and its people.

In this series we’ll study Japanese using different tools such as videos, games, and different exercises. We’ll explore different aspects of Japanese culture and work on more complex vocabulary, grammar, and sentence patterns. We’ll also watch lots of videos, play games, and read graded readers among other things.

Note: Japanese Through Culture is for students who already have a basic level of Japanese.

Within weeks of its 1908 publication, L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables became a bestseller. Over the years, this charming orphan story put Montgomery and her imaginative Prince Edward Island on a global map.

Despite the fact that Anne of Green Gables is Canada’s bestselling novel throughout the world—or because of it—Montgomery was ignored by the literati and scholarship. Montgomery was a public intellectual, the first female Canadian fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and invested Officer of the Order of the British Empire. Still she was dismissed as “just” a children’s writer, a regionalist, or a woman. It was 25 years after Montgomery’s death before children’s literature and feminist scholars began to recover her work as worthy of study.

While there is a robust field of Montgomery scholarship, there are areas where our focus is sometimes too narrow. One of these is the category of “realistic” fiction. While there is a kind of verisimilitude about everyday life in the late Victorian era in her work, the realism is pressed to the margins of definition as Montgomery romanticizes the worlds she creates. And can we disagree that there is something magical about Anne herself? By changing our way of approach and by looking at Anne of Green Gables as a fantasy novel, what can we unveil in this classic novel?

Native Prince Edward Islander and Montgomery scholar Brenton Dickieson will lead students through a rereading of Anne of Green Gables using the lenses we use to study fantasy and speculative fiction with the goal of allowing one of the greatest living children’s books to live in new ways.

Module Description from Dr. Sara Brown (Lecturing Preceptor):

JRR Tolkien is one of those rare authors whose poetry is as accomplished as his prose writing. Up to this point, though, those who wished to focus primarily on Tolkien’s poetry had to access a significant number of books and online resources to do so, as they were scattered far and wide. Now, a Most Delightful Event has occurred – for the first time, a collected volume of Tolkien’s poetry is available, and it is a Tome of Significant Size!

In this hybrid course, we will read and discuss a selection of these poems, enjoying them for their aesthetic appeal as well as analysing them for Tolkien’s style, use of language, and the poetic forms he employed. This is a hybrid course, in which one class per week will be a lecture and the second class will be group discussion.

There are so many poems in these volumes that the intention is to spread the course over several months. If you can’t make one or more of the months, feel free to dip in and out as suits you!

I am also delighted to announce that one lecture session per month will be led by the one and only James Tauber, who will focus on language and the formal elements of the poetry.

Bonus Lecture from Dr. Olsen each month! We are delighted to announce that each month Dr. Corey Olsen will offer a bonus lecture on Tolkien's poetry. Each month the SPACE team will share Dr. Olsen's bonus lecture with all enrolled students that month in The Poetic Corpus of J. R. R. Tolkien series.

Note: Dr. Olsen's first bonus lecture will occur on Sat. Nov 16 at 9:30 AM Eastern. Moreover, it will be unique in that it will be the kick-off to our Fall Space Showcase and accessible for FREE to all showcase participants since our showcases are free events (Showcase Registration is open!). However, if you cannot attend the showcase, no fear! The SPACE team will disseminate the bonus lecture recording to all students enrolled in The Poetic Corpus of J. R. R. Tolkien in November 2024.

The module will follow an 8-session structure as shown below:

Outline	8-Session Structure
Week 1	Lecture 1: The Introduction + Morning · Morning Song
	Discussion 1: The Dale-Lands/ Evening · Completorium/ Wood-Sunshine/ The Sirens Feast · The Sirens/ The Battle of the Eastern Field
Week 2	Lecture 2: The New Lemminkäinen and Lemminkäinen Goeth to the Ford of Oxen
	Discussion 2: A Fragment of an Epic/ The Grimness of the Sea · The Tides · Sea Chant of an Elder Day · Sea-Song of an Elder Day · The Horns of Ylmir/ From Iffley · Valedictory/ Darkness on the Road/ Sunset in a Town
Week 3	Lecture 3: James Tauber Lecture - The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star · The Last Voyage of Éarendel · Éala! Éarendel Engla Beorhtast!
	Discussion 3: Outside/ Magna Dei Gloria/ The Story of Kullervo/Dark · Copernicus v. Ptolemy · Copernicus and Ptolemy
Week 4	Lecture 4: Why the Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon: An East Anglian Phantasy · A Faërie: Why the Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon · The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon
	Discussion 4: The Minstrel Renounces the Song · The Lay of Earendel · The Bidding of the Minstrel/ The Mermaid’s Flute/ The Sparrow’s Morning Chirp to a Lazy Mortal · Bilink, Bilink! · Sparrow Song/ As Two Fair Trees

Module Description from Dr. Sara Brown (Lecturing Preceptor):

JRR Tolkien is one of those rare authors whose poetry is as accomplished as his prose writing. Up to this point, though, those who wished to focus primarily on Tolkien’s poetry had to access a significant number of books and online resources to do so, as they were scattered far and wide. Now, a Most Delightful Event has occurred – for the first time, a collected volume of Tolkien’s poetry is available, and it is a Tome of Significant Size!

In this hybrid course, we will read and discuss a selection of these poems, enjoying them for their aesthetic appeal as well as analysing them for Tolkien’s style, use of language, and the poetic forms he employed. This is a hybrid course, in which one class per week will be a lecture and the second class will be group discussion.

There are so many poems in these volumes that the intention is to spread the course over several months. If you can’t make one or more of the months, feel free to dip in and out as suits you!

I am also delighted to announce that one lecture session per month will be led by the one and only James Tauber, who will focus on language and the formal elements of the poetry.

Bonus Lecture from Dr. Olsen each month! We are delighted to announce that each month Dr. Corey Olsen will offer a bonus lecture on Tolkien's poetry. Each month the SPACE team will share Dr. Olsen's bonus lecture with all enrolled students that month in The Poetic Corpus of J. R. R. Tolkien series.

Note: Dr. Olsen's first bonus lecture will occur on Sat. Nov 16 at 9:30 AM Eastern. Moreover, it will be unique in that it will be the kick-off to our Fall Space Showcase and accessible for FREE to all showcase participants since our showcases are free events (Showcase Registration is open!). However, if you cannot attend the showcase, no fear! The SPACE team will disseminate the bonus lecture recording to all students enrolled in The Poetic Corpus of J. R. R. Tolkien in November 2024.

The module will follow an 8-session structure as shown below:

Outline	8-Session Structure
Week 1	Lecture 1: The Introduction + Morning · Morning Song
	Discussion 1: The Dale-Lands/ Evening · Completorium/ Wood-Sunshine/ The Sirens Feast · The Sirens/ The Battle of the Eastern Field
Week 2	Lecture 2: The New Lemminkäinen and Lemminkäinen Goeth to the Ford of Oxen
	Discussion 2: A Fragment of an Epic/ The Grimness of the Sea · The Tides · Sea Chant of an Elder Day · Sea-Song of an Elder Day · The Horns of Ylmir/ From Iffley · Valedictory/ Darkness on the Road/ Sunset in a Town
Week 3	Lecture 3: James Tauber Lecture - The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star · The Last Voyage of Éarendel · Éala! Éarendel Engla Beorhtast!
	Discussion 3: Outside/ Magna Dei Gloria/ The Story of Kullervo/Dark · Copernicus v. Ptolemy · Copernicus and Ptolemy
Week 4	Lecture 4: Why the Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon: An East Anglian Phantasy · A Faërie: Why the Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon · The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon
	Discussion 4: The Minstrel Renounces the Song · The Lay of Earendel · The Bidding of the Minstrel/ The Mermaid’s Flute/ The Sparrow’s Morning Chirp to a Lazy Mortal · Bilink, Bilink! · Sparrow Song/ As Two Fair Trees

After having discussed the complex phenomenon of seidr magic in module 1, we are going to have a closer look at its most violent practices. Beyond domestic practices, sorcerous aggression manifested e.g. through driving the enemy insane, sending spirits to attack, causing misfortune and on a much broader scale on the battlefield.

A clear projection of supernatural intervention is offered by Odin‘s servants the valkyrjur, but also shapeshifting berserkers caught by ritual frenzy, with powers stemming from Odin himself, “The Terrible” in his sorcerous role. Battle spells also seem to have been preserved as literary remnants with a chance at authenticity derived from ideas in older poems, like ideas about war-fettering, invulnerability or disguise.

Nota bene: The module can also be attended without having taken module 1. Although recommended, it is not a prerequisite. You will still have the chance to explore Norse mentalities and catch a glimpse of fascinating beliefs and sources for Iron age and early medieval Scandinavia. Topics included in this module: 1 Norse war deities 2 Supernatural agency in battle 3 Valkyrjur and berserkir 4 The afterlife in Valhöll.