English 150: Chaucer and Shakespeare: Estranged Bedfellows of Literary History
Team-taught with Professor Yu Jin Ko (Dept. of English). This course investigates the complex relationship between Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare, perhaps the two most foundational figures in the English literary tradition. Moving through and beyond the poetry these two authors wrote, we also complicate the view of history that locates Chaucer and Shakespeare firmly on different sides of the bright historical line often drawn between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Chaucer and Shakespeare -- the Father of English Poetry and the Bard of Avon -- both occupy places of cherished authority in the English literary tradition. Rather than regarding these secure positions as impediments to the new or provisional, we believe that the very familiarity of their authority offers special opportunities to think experimentally. The most recent criticism of the literary period between Chaucer and Shakespeare is engaged in challenging the traditional periodization and destabilizing the canon.
Medieval & Renaissance Studies 247: Arthurian Legends (Spring 2005)
Did he really exist? Or was he fictional? Although these alternatives appear simple, the questions they raise are not easily answered. The great hero-king of Dark Ages Britain, Arthur, whether he "existed" or not, quickly became the nexus of legend and speculation. As the centuries passed, Arthurian myths expressed, in turn, the spirited ethos of the Celtic people; the imperialistic aspirations of the Norman conquerors; late medieval anxieties about gender, identity, and privacy; and, even before the Middle Ages were over, nostalgia for lost ideals of honor and chivalry. The Arthurian legend continues to haunt the modern imagination, whether as a suggestive parallel to contemporary turmoil or as a seductive escape - or both (as when John F. Kennedy's presidency was dubbed "Camelot on the Potomoc"). In this course, we will study this legend from literary, structural, and historical perspectives in an attempt to understand the underlying sources of its appeal, while recognizing the fundamental ways in which the legends have changed over time. Our disciplinary approach, however, will be chiefly literary, as we will look closely at the language and thematic organization of fictionalized accounts of the Arthurian story from the 11th through the 21st centuries, with an emphasis on the earlier periods. We will also explore how the Arthurian theme has been taken up in other media, especially in film where it has been a favorite and recurring motif. Arthurian Legends counts as a unit toward the English major, though not toward the period distribution requirement for the English major.
Team-taught with Professor Louise Marlow (Department of Religion). The ways in which communities envisage otherness are often closely related to their understandings of themselves. Historically, a community's sense of its own identity evolves in conjunction with its need to distinguish itself from its neighbors and from subversive-seeming elements within its own makeup. This new course examines, in a comparative framework, various conceptualisations of the other in the European and Islamic Middle Ages. Materials under consideration include travel narratives by European and Middle Eastern travellers, merchants and sailors; European Crusader poems and Middle Eastern descriptions of real interactions with Crusaders; religious texts; maps and accounts of the marvelous; and fictional stories that feature travel and 'orientalism.'
English 315: The Eaten Word- Food and Drink in Medieval Literature and Culture (Spring 2004)
It has been said that English literature began in a pub. This rather startling claim actually turns out to be true in more ways than one might first imagine. The father of English poetry, Geoffrey Chaucer, set his most famous and influential poem, The Canterbury Tales, in the Tabard - a pub of sorts - where a sundry group of pilgrims sets out to win a supper as a storytelling prize. More than 500 years earlier, the proto-poem of all English literature, the epic adventure Beowulf, set its hero the foundational task of liberating a mead hall (again, a pub of sorts) from a gluttonous monster. But on an even more primal level, it might be claimed that poetry had its start after a hot meal around a warm fireside (another pub) on a cold night, at a time we no longer remember, when the first man or woman undertook to spin the first story. This primitive connection between food and literature emerges in many famous literary works from Plato's Symposium to Boccaccio's Decameron, that stage tale-telling as after-dinner entertainment. The links between food and literature are indeed so numerous and so profound that it is easy to forget them. This course will try to foreground and to analyze the ways that poetry borrows, indeed incorporates, food metaphors; the ways that food provides writers with a means of talking about their own craft, about connections between the literal and the figurative and between the secular and the sacred. Even the absence, or deprivation, of food has a profound signifying power, as it brings the most primitive and powerful of all human drives --hunger -- to the center of consciousness. The manner in which humanity satisfies its various hungers, its food taboos and food practices, goes to the center of a civilization's self-definition, to the heart of what it means to be called a civilization at all. The culinary arts, as we will see, have a language, just as the linguistic arts require taste, and careful conversation about the relationship between the two has a surprising power to illuminate both.
English 315: Advanced Chaucer (Spring 2005)
The dream-vision was the medieval equivalent of the modern novel in its popularity as a form. More ubiquitous than any other high literary genre, it was the challenge at which every serious poet was obliged to try his hand. Most of Chaucer's important early poetry was therefore written in this form, as was the poetry of many of the authors against whose skill he tested his own poetic genius, including Jean de Meun, Dante, Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, and others. Why was this genre so compelling to medieval poets? Did it survive into the Renaissance or later periods, and if so, how had it changed? What value is there in studying the dream-vision today? Does this medieval form that mapped the human mind onto the structure of literary allegory have anything to tell us now about how people think and imagine themselves into the modern world? By looking closely at some of the poetry of Chaucer and his visionary peers and successors, we will address these and other questions, for, as GC would himself have observed, "out of olde feldes, as men seyth, / Cometh al this newe corn from yer to yer, / And out of olde bokes, in good feyth, / Cometh al this newe science that men lere" (Parliament of Fowls 22-25).
Writing 125 / English 120: Poetry (Fall 2002)
This course fulfills both the Writing 125 requirement and also the English 120 requirement for the English major. We thus need to conform to the policies and meet the expectations of both these courses. As in all sections of English 120, the focus of our work will be on close reading of poetry, though we will also read a Shakespeare play in addition to a selection of lyric poems. Five papers will be assigned. These will be submitted at the due dates listed on the syllabus and then gathered together in a final portfolio; one paper, of the student's selection, should be revised to include the use of at least one critical source, a summary of which each student will also present to the rest of the class orally. Memorization and recitation of at least 40 lines of poetry can substitute for one of the papers, but not for the paper revision that incorporates a critical source. The syllabus, as you will see below, is divided into units, variously formal and thematic.