• Identify key “quest archetypes” and apply them to contemporary problems;
• Consider, in detail, the motivations, features, structure, and problems inherent in such quests along with their—often unforeseen—social, intellectual, economic, cultural, and ecological impacts;
• Apply advanced cognitive skills to build transdisciplinary knowledge that fosters transformative dialogue between philosophy, literary studies, social sciences, intellectual history, medical humanities, business studies, and other fields;
• Implement meta-cognitive skills in approaching complex contemporary problems;
• Collaboratively create your own versions of a “modern quest”, along with a critical analysis of its motivations and multifaceted impacts; and
• Critically analyse themes of departure, delay, enchantment, and encounters with the unknown across disciplines.

The indicative outline syllabus below provides an overview of the key sections and subsections of the module rather than a week by week breakdown.

Introduction: Leaving Home

• Quest Archetypes

• Education as Quest: Why and How do we leave?

The Quest for Love: Departure, Desire, and Discontent

• Enchanting the Beloved: Dulcinea and the "Damsel in Distress"

• Your Princess is in Another Castle: Gendered Agency in Video Games

The Quest for Freedom: Escape

• Entrepreneurship and the Enchantment of "Being Your Own Boss"

• Space Quests and the Climate Crisis

The Quest for a Cure: Facing the Unknown

• Healing and Enchantment

• Transgressive Hybrids and the Limits of Medical Inquiry

The Quest for Significance: Exile

• The Holy Grail: Perceval, Galahad, and other Extremists

• Relic or Souvenir? Knick Knacks and Invested Objects

Conclusions

Coursework	Critical Quest: 3,000 word essay (40%) Quest Log: 1,200 word commonplace book (20%)
Practical work	Your Modern Quest: Group project (25%)
Exam	Troll Challenges: Pop quizzes (15%)

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King. London: Penguin Classics, 2004.

Auster, Paul. David Mazzucchelli, and Paul Karasik. City of Glass: The Graphic Novel. Reissue with introduction by Art Spiegelman. New York: Picador, 2004.

Belting, Hans. Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art. trans. Edmund Jephcott.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Benson, Sarah. “Reproduction, Fragmentation, and Collection: Rome and the Origin of Souvenirs.” In Architecture and
Tourism, edited by D. Medina Lansansky and Brian McLaren, 15-36. Oxford: Berg, 2004.

Berman, Morris. The Reenchantment of the World. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981.

Bird, William L.. Jr. Souvenir Nation: Relics, Keepsakes, and Curios from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of
American History. Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History in association with Princeton
Architectural Press: New York, 2013.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 3rd Ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.

Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Don Quijote (1605). Translated by Edith Grossman. New York: Ecco Press, 2005.

Davenport, Christian. The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos. London:
Hachette, 2018.

Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land. Edited by Michael North. Norton Critical Edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000.

Etchells, Pete. Lost in a Good Game: Why We Play Video Games and What They Can Do For Us. London: Icon
Books, 2019).

Fassone, Riccardo. Every game is an island: endings and extremities in video games. London: Bloomsbury, 2018.

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Translated by A.M. Sheridan.
London: Routledge, 2003.

Homer, The Odyssey. Trans. Emily Wilson. New York: W.W. Norton, 2018.

Jasko, K., Webber, D., Kruglanski, Arie W., et al. “Social context moderates the effects of quest for significance on
violent extremism.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2019). Doi: 10.1037/pspi0000198

Kruglanski, Arie W., Michele J. Gelfand, Jocelyn J. Bélanger, et al. “Significance Quest Theory as the Driver of
Radicalization” in idem., Resilience and Resolve (London: Imperial College Press, 2015), pp.17-30.

Lacy, Norris J., ed., The Lancelot-Grail: The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation. 5 vols.
(New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1993–1996).

Lawrence, Chris. “What if Zelda Wasn’t a Girl? Problematizing Ocarina of Time’s Great Gender Debate.” In Harper T.,
Adams M., Taylor N., Queerness in Play. 97-113. Palgrave, 2018.

Lee, Raymond M. “Weber, Re-Enchantment and Social Futures.” Time and Society 19.2 (2010): 180-192.

Lester, Anne E. “What remains: women, relics and remembrance in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade.” Journal of
Medieval History, 40 (2014): 311-328.

McPhilipps, Kathleen. “Believing in Post-Modernity: Technologies of Enchantment in Contemporary Marian Devotion.”
In Popular Spiritualities: The Politics of Contemporary Enchantment, ed. Lynne Hume and Kathleen McPhillips, 147-
158. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006.

Murdock, Maureen. The Heroine’s Journey. Boulder, CA: Shambhala Publications, 1990.

Nicholson, Sarah. “The Problem of Woman as Hero in the Work of Joseph Campbell,” Feminist Theology 19.2 (2011):
182–193. doi: 10.1177/0966735010384331

Osborne, Richard L. “The Dark Side of the Entrepreneur,” Long Range Planning 24.3 (1991): 26-31. Doi: 10.1016/0024-6301(91)90181-M

Rushdie, Salman. Quichotte. London: Jonathan Cape, 2019.

Saler, Michael. “Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographic Review,” The American Historical Review 111, 3 (June 2006): 692-716.

Segal, Robert A. Theorizing About Myth. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, edited by J. Paul Hunter. Second Norton Critical Edition. New
York: W.W. Norton, 2011.

Sutcliffe, Steven M., “Practising New Age Soteriologies in the Rational Order,” 159-174. In Hume and McPhillips, eds., Popular Spiritualities.

von Eschenbach, Wolfram. Parzival. Translated by Cyril Edwards. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Westover, Tara. Educated. New York: Random House, 2018.

Through this module, you will develop different skills that are sought by employers which will support your professional development. We have highlighted this to enable you to identify and reflect on the skills you have acquired and apply them throughout your professional journey including during the recruitment process whether this is in a CV/application form or at an interview.

• Critical and independent thinking — developed through: Weekly tasks, readings, and homework; encounters with and employment of complex theories of mythography, feminist critiques of heroic models, and the dark side of entrepreneurship; encounters with quest narratives regarding departure, enchantment, and self-deconstructing quests from ancient world to present day and the need to find, evaluate, and critique connections between these (along with their reception); and Problem-Based Learning activities and in-class discussion.
• Written communication – developed through: Research Essay; and weekly reflection diaries (blogs) with ongoing weekly feedback for each student.
• Oral communication – developed through: Presentation at the end of term where students create their own heroic quest explain why/how they created it in line with texts and theories seen in the module; and weekly seminar tasks and presentations.
• Research and evaluation – developed through: Weekly problems and tasks that require the students to research and evaluate issues concerning the origin, function, purpose, and power of heroic models and quest narratives; the final research paper involves the formulation of their own research question and conducting their own in-depth reviews and analysis of theories, archival materials, case studies, or interpretations of expressive works (fiction, non-fiction, and many works that defy and question this binary).
• Time and self-management — developed through: Weekly groupwork and problems; a series of five pop quizzes throughout the term that measure engagement both with the readings and with in-class discussions; group presentation where students create their own heroic quest and provide analysis of the choices that shape the underlying heroic journey, benefit (or lack thereof) to the community, and underlying problems in their quest construction. The project requires consistent group work, task management, and the keeping of a groupwork diary/log; and weekly readings, problems, and tasks (sometimes in groups, other times individually).