Week 6 Tuesday, 26 October

draft of proposal for paper due

Readings for the Week

Love and Romance

OED definition of "romance" [below]

"Romantic," Raymond Williams

Video: Le Roman de La Rose, Brian Merrilees [32 min.]

Excerpts from Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love/De arte honeste amandi (1184-86; Latin prose [parody?])
Book 1, Chapter I "What Love is"
II "Between What Persons Love may Exist"
III "Where Love Gets its Name"
IV "What the Effect of Love is"
V "What Persons are Fit for Love"
VI "In What Manner Love may be Acquired, and in How Many Ways"
"Third Dialogue"
XI "The Love of Peasants"
Book 2, Chapter I "How Love, When it has been Acquired, May be Kept"
II "How a Love, Once Consummated, May be Increased"
VIII "The Rules of Love"

"Lovesickness" ("amor qui et eros dicitur morbus est" ["the love that is called eros is a disease"]), Constantinus Africanus, Viaticum (12th c.; Latin prose)

Chaucer, The Knight's Tale (c. 1385-95; verse romance)

[On the Canterbury Tales], e.e. cummings [below]

a ME romance, TBA

parts of armor [below]

Video: The Fifteen Joys of Marriage, Roberta Frank and Carolyn Eisen [11 min.]

"The Social Function of the Middle English Romances," Stephen Knight

The Oxford English Dictionary

Romance (romæ.ns), sb. and a.
II.2. A tale in verse, embodying the adventures of some hero of chivalry, esp. of those of the great cycles of mediæval legend, and belonging both in matter and form to the ages of knighthood; also, in later use, a prose tale of similar character. [c. 1300]
Org. denoting a composition in the vernacular (French, etc., ) as contrasted with works in Latin.

3. A fictitous narrative in prose of which the scene and incidents are very remote from those of ordinary life; esp. one of the class prevalent in the 16th and 17th centuries, in which the story is often overlaid with long disquisitions and digressions.
[c. 1638]
The immediate source of this use was app. French roman.
b. A romantic novel or narrative. [c. 1831]
6. An extravagant fiction, invention, or story; a wild or wanton exaggeration; a picturesque falsehood. [c. 1497]

Romantic (romæ.ntik), a. and sb.
A. adj. 1. Of the nature of, having the quality of romance in respect to form or content.
[c. 1659]
2. Of a fabulous or fictitious character; having no foundation in fact.
[c. 1667]

honour corruption villainy holiness
riding in fragrance of sunlight (side by side
all in a singing wonder of blossoming yes
riding) to him who died that death should be dead
humblest and proudest eagerly wandering
(equally all alive in miraculous day)
merrily moving through sweet forgiveness of spring
(over the under the gift of the earth of the sky
knight and ploughman pardoner wife and nun
merchant frere clerk somnour miller and reve
and geoffrey and all) come up from the never of when
come into the now of forever come riding alive
down while crylessly drifting through vast most
nothing's own nothing children of dust