The medieval world is marked by its distinctly alien and yet surprisingly modern character. Its symbolic system and interpretation of the world is complex and often self-contradictory: on the one hand stands a religious tradition that suspiciously rejects anything heterodox as heretical, idolotrous, evil, or untrue; on the other hand stands a cross-tradition embracing the fantastic, the erotic, the unconscious, and the subversive. This course will introduce students to the alterity of the Middle Ages by surveying a broad canvas of medieval authors and genres alongside their critical and historical traditions. We will address such topics as the placement of self, authorship, and authority in the medieval text; the processes of medieval reader-response and interpretation; and gender and sexuality in medieval culture.

Texts:

Augustine, Confessions
The Book of Margery Kempe
Chretien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances
Dante, Vita Nuova
The Letters of Abelard and Heloise
Marie de France, Lais
Malory, Morte Darthur (ed. Helen Cooper)
Pearl

Lacan, Ecrits (optional)
various xeroxes and web documents


Course Requirements:

I. Attendance and participation in all seminar meetings

II. Oral presentation, 10-15 minutes, introducing the rest of the class to salient concepts from one of the critical or theoretical texts on the syllabus. The presentation will then serve as a launching point for class discussing. A written form of the presentation should also be submitted to me on the day delivered.

III. Seminar paper, 15-20 pages typed, double-spaced, on a topic of your choice, which discusses in some fashion one of the literary texts of the class in relation to some critical perspective or concept.

Schedule:

Alterity, Hermeneutics, Culture, Historicism

Week 1: Introduction

Week 2: Reading: Boccaccio, from Decameron; Malory, Books I and VI (Sangrail); Jauss, "Alterity and Modernity of Medieval Literature"; Questions: How do we know the truth about the past? Note narrator's claims not to know the truth, attribution of this difficulty to historical distance, differences between Malory and his sources.

Week 3: Reading: Malory, Books VII (Lancelot and Guenivere) and VIII (Death of Arthur). Questions: What is the nature of the conflict between the ideal and the real? The true and the false?

Self, Author, Authority

Week 4: Reading: Chretien de Troyes, Erec et Enide. Hegel, master-slave dialectic. Lacan, "The Mirror-phase." What is the self and how do we conceive of it?

Week 5: Reading: Chretien de Troyes, Lancelot.

Week 6: Reading: Augustine, Confessions. Why is it necessary to sublimate the individuality of the self for a communal or ideological purpose? How is this achieved?

Week 7: Reading: Dante, La Vita Nuova. What is the role of the author? How does personal experience become authoritative?

Sign, Text, Reader

Week 8: Reading: Petrarch, Lyric Poems and Book I of Secretum (from web). What is the role of the reader in the text? How does personal experience mediate what we learn from the "authorities"?

Week 9: Reading: Pearl; Augustine, On Christian Doctrine (xerox). What is the role of the "sign" in the medieval text? In the medieval world? How does the reader learn to read the world via the "book of nature"?

Week 10: Reading: Marie de France, "Chaitivel," "Chevrefoil," "Guigemar." Note the pared-down world of the text: every word, action, and image is laden with significance.

Week 11: Reading: Chretien de Troyes, Perceval

Gender, Textuality, Sexuality

Week 12: Reading: Abelard and Heloise, Historia Calamitatum and Letters (1-3). Marie de France, "Eliduc," "Laustic." How are women framed in male discourse? In female discourse? How are women enslaved by the ideology of courtly love?

Week 13: Reading: Book of Margery Kempe chs 1-5, 11-14, 24, 35-36, and 59; Lacan, "Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis."

Week 14: Reading: Debate between Helen and Ganymede (Boswell); Alain de Lille, Complaint of Nature (from web). What is the relationship between sexuality, writing, and philosophy?

Week 15: Reading: Amis e Amilun; "Lanval" from Marie de France; Sedgwick, Between Men. How might Sedgwick's elaboration of "homosocial behavior" provide ways of conceptualizing the conflict between interior and social roles?