A Study of Ice and Fire: Now Game of Thrones to be taught at University

Do you like Game of Thrones? Do you like Game of Thrones enough to study it in college? Then get ready to move to University of British Columbia. The Canada university is offering a course focused on Game of Thrones… with one condition… you have to read all the books in the A Song of Ice and Fire series before enrolling for class. [caption id=“attachment_2487944” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  A Game of Thrones book.[/caption] The course is called “Our Modern Medieval: The Song of Ice and Fire as contemporary Medievalism” and will be taught by associate professor Robert Rouse. The aim of the course is to study medieval history through the book series by George RR Martin. “The course will take the works of George RR Martin as the central text for an investigation of how the medieval is reimagined in our current moment. Reacting both to the High Fantasy genre of the 1970s and 80s (that inspired by, and largely imitating the mode of Tolkien’s novels), and to post-everything nature of the last twenty years, Martin’s works hold an influential place in the popular modern imagined medieval, largely supplanting any real notion of the European Middle Ages in the minds of most of its readers and viewers. As such, we will be considering Martin’s works as much for what they tell us about our own moment, as for what they tell us about our ideas of the past,” the syllabus reads. As expected, the students seemed to excited about the idea of studying a TV show. “The students were really enthused. Of course, they’re all Game of Thrones fans at the moment because of the TV series,” Professor Rouse was quoted as saying by Metro News. He described the course saying, “We’ll get them to think about and talk about what Martin is doing by re-working these ideas through a very dark, modern lens and what that’s telling us about our understanding of both the past and the present.” How they plan to factor in the dragons and wights, which did not exist in the medieval times, we do not know yet, but it will be surely be interesting to study the politics of Westeros.