First-Year Writing Seminar: Twilight of the Gods

Catalog description

“The nymphs are departed.” From Milton’s Paradise Lost to Marvel’s Thor: Ragnarok, the departure of the gods haunts Western literature and art: Titans deposed by their Olympian children, pagan gods banished by the advent of Christ, spirits of woods and rivers displaced by industrialization. Whether defeated in epic battles or consigned to neglect and decline, departing deities leave traces of their abandoned cults scattered across the modern landscape, ruins marking once sacred sites. In this writing seminar, we will ask what is at stake in these stories of fallen gods and their lingering afterlives in the places they once inhabited, now overwritten and overrun by a disenchanting modernity. What sociohistorical forces does their departure allegorically represent? What is exiled from the world along with these banished spirits? What remains behind? We will explore these questions by closely reading a series of works ranging in genre and time period, from Baroque and Romantic epic to modernist poetry and prose to contemporary fantasy. Students will write three analytic essays, formulating critical questions and attending to the imagery and rhetoric of specific texts. Authors may include Milton, Keats, Kipling, Seznec, H.D., Eliot, Tolkien, Jansson, Gaiman, and Jemisin.