The weird, and more Rabelais

TUESDAY

• discussion of blog questions from the last two weeks, on and around Rabelais and Bosch; feat. giants

THURSDAY

• student presentations: Ian (Voynich), Coco (werewolves, from Bisclavret to Twilight)
• some more Rabelais (outside the “main” canonical texts, offshoots, margins, drolleries, doodles): the Songes drôlatiques / Drolatic Dreams: see Public Domain Review; Poemas del río Wang, “The unbearable mask”; and Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Réserve des livres rares, RES-Y2-2173 
• dreams, visions, phantasies, imaginings
• what to do with them next? the broader ideas of interpreting, interpretation, translation; finding / making sense and understanding; the marvellous critical and  creative joys of geeking out and/in an Arts / Humanities education as what Chaucer calls “sentence and solaas” (common phrase in many places, ex. the inevitable Boethius too)
• what happens to them next? Rabelais on the border between medieval drollerie and early modern grotesque; the broader ideas behind these terms and what they tell us (deep / rich philology) about perceptions of “the medieval” and “the modern”