Class Assignments

A. Key Questions

The first and last of these exercises are required of everyone in the class. Everyone is encouraged to think about and take notes on all the other questions, since these will often serve as the jumping-off point for our class discussions, but you are required to choose five of them to write up as more formal statements to turn in. Your response should be 1-2 typed pages long (handwritten responses will not be accepted); you do not need to include any reading outside the assigned text, but if you do, any such references should be properly cited. Your responses are due at the beginning of class on the date specified—as with all written work, please turn in a copy and keep the original for yourself. The schedule below may help you budget your time more effectively.

August 28 (required): Compare the content, organization and apparatus of the medieval sections of two major anthologies of British Literature (Norton, Longman, Broadview, etc.). Some of the questions you might want to consider are: what distinguishes one from another? What texts do they have in common? What constitutes the ‘canon’ of early English literature? How are the texts classified and divided? What kinds of introductory or additional material do they include, and why? Prepare a summary of your findings for the class.

September 6: How is Augustine’s Confessions different from a modern autobiography?
September 13: Why is Bede so concerned about the proper date for celebrating Easter?
September 20: What is the Anglo-Saxon conception of the ‘self’ as reflected in its shorter lyric poetry?
September 27: Does Beowulf go to heaven?
October 2: Is Guillaume’s section of the Roman de la Rose “unfinished”?
October 11: What do you consider the most important differences between Old and Middle English lyric poetry?
October 23: What is the presumed audience for Middle English romance?
November 1: Is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight a satire? if so, what does it satirize?
November 8: What relations do you see between medieval travel narratives and romance?
November 15: In what ways does the story of King Arthur articulate a theory of history?
November 27: What relations do you see between the form of the poem Pearl and its meaning(s)?

December 4-6 (required): In our last week of class we will discuss the following topics, among others, from the point of view of both theory (how do we read early literature? what critical tools can we use or adapt?) and practice (how do we teach it? what methods and texts are most amenable to modern students? what is our responsibility, as teachers, to the material and to our classes?). You can prepare your written discussion on one of these topics, or on another of your own choice:

Prose style – deveopment, excerpts and examples. Does prose have a history? How do you teach literary style in translation?
Poetics and prosody – models and methods. Is scansion necessary? Does form embody culture?
Allusion and reference – what students don’t know. How do you teach backgrounds? What is background, and what is foreground, from this distance?
Manuscript and authorship – (re)constructing the scene of writing. What is manuscript textuality? Where is the song in the text? How do ascribe meaning or intention to an anonymous and possible composite work? What is an “author” in the Middle Ages?

B. Critical Summaries

You are required to do three critical reviews of secondary material over the course of the semester; each should be at least three pages long and discuss both the argument of the work and its place in the critical history of the text it discusses. Models of style and structure can be found in the reviews published in any good scholarly journal. The critical works can be taken from the syllabus or discovered on your own; you may review essays as well as entire books, as long as the quality of your reading and explication remains consistently high.

You should plan to do at least one of these every four or five weeks, in order to avoid having to do them all at the end of the semester. Each one should be 3-5 typed pages long. Please let me know before you begin your writing which work you intend to review. Normally these reviews should be turned in during the week after we discuss the work in question: a summary of a critical work on Beowulf wpuld be due October 2, on the Middle English lyrics on October 16, and so on.

I will be happy to discuss your writing with you at any time, read rough drafts or look over outlines, go through primary and secondary texts to develop ideas, and so on. Please take advantage of this opportunity; in my experience it inevitably helps both your work and my understanding of it.

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