ENG 605, Medieval Literature (undergraduate)

In ENG 605, we will read a variety of texts written in England between 1350 and 1500. While our focus is on literary texts, we will also read selections from a number of discourses (medical, legal, and historical) in order to develop a sense of the culture that produced, and was produced by, such texts. How was the body constructed in the Middle Ages? How was the self constructed? How were social relations constructed? How did gender, race, and class intersect with constructions of the self and society? What did medieval "literary criticism" look like, in theory and in practice? To ask such questions is to read contextually, within the period, to the degree to which we are able. However, we will also read within our own contemporary context in order to discover continuities and discontinuities between then and now. Thus we will explore how we have constructed the Middle Ages, and how such constructions work for us. (Think of Pulp Fiction, when Marsellus says: "I'm going to get medieval on your ass." What does that mean?) Likely texts: a handful of short lyrics and poems (together with a few modern medievalized poems or poems with medieval themes), Chaucer's Knight's Tale, the Pearl, as well as excerpts from William Langland's Piers Plowman, Margery Kempe's Book, and Malory's Morte Darthur. We may also make a few forays into continental literature and into non-Western literature. Requirements: an oral report on a film set in the Middle Ages and two papers, both around 6-7 pages.

 

 

ENG 281, Topics in Medieval Literature: Romance (graduate)

We will survey the development of the medieval vernacular romance--and the development of "romance"--in its historical and cultural context, and explore the vexed question of genre as we consider audience, theme, function, and influence. Likely texts: Chaucer's Knight's Tale and/or Troilus and Criseyde, selections from Sir Thomas Malory's Morte D'Arthur, the "oriental" Floris and Blauncheflur and an excerpt from a Middle English tale of Alexander the Great, several ME short poems and lyrics, along with French examples of romance, including excerpts from the legend of Tristan and Iseult and from the works of Chrétien de Troyes. We'll also consider what romance is not by reading a handful of fabliaux-and we'll read as well the most well-known of chansons de geste, The Song of Roland, in order to explore how the ideologies of romance function in opposition to, or are embedded in, other genres. In addition, we will read short treatises on love, lovesickness, adultery, marriage customs and laws, and consider some of the classical representations of romantic love that shaped medieval notions. In essence, we will study what Denis de Rougemont famously called Love in the Western World: the beginnings of a history of desire before Freud and Lacan taught us to think about desire, and consider how the medieval concept of love and romance has certain continuities and discontinuities with our own. Requirements: an oral report, a short annotation or archival project, and a final paper of around 20 pages.