| FALL
2008
N.B. ~ PATRICIA DAILEY, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, is on leave for the 2008-2009 academic year.
CHRIS CHISM, RUTGERS UNIVERSITY
Tolkien and Medieval Literature
This course explores the medieval sources of Tolkien’s mythologies, and puts the 20th century fantasist into conversation with Anglo-Saxon elegy, medieval romance, and theories of language, linguistics, semiotics, and phenomenology. We will begin by reading excerpts from Tolkien’s non-trilogy works: The Hobbit, Lost Tales, and The Silmarillion and three key scholarly essays. There will be a short introduction to the linguistic features of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English. Then we will proceed to survey the medieval texts that haunt his works: Beowulf, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Volsunga Saga, The Poetic Edda, The Song of Roland, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. At the same time we are reading the medieval texts we will slowly be working our way through the trilogy: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King. You are warned in advance that this class will involve a lot of reading, some of it in Middle English. Excerpts from the Peter Jackson movies will be screened and discussed, along with supplementary readings on temporality, imagination, fantasy, and nostalgia. Requirements: 2 short papers, optional class presentation, and short weekly response papers.
STACY KLEIN, RUTGERS UNIVERSITY
Old English Language and Literature
M/W 2:50-4:10 in 212 Murray
Course Description: This course is designed to give students with no
previous knowledge of Old English the basic skills necessary to read and
interpret Old English texts. We will examine a variety of poetic and
prose writings, including Old English alliterative shorter poems dealing
with exile, gender roles, and early medieval cults of the cross;
chronicles and historical narratives designed to construct specific ideas
about the past and historical memory; and excerpts from the growing body
of vernacular religious writings produced for an Anglo-Saxon populace
that, according to some monks, was becoming increasingly illiterate.
Throughout the course, attention will be given to Old English
pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary, and most of the individual class
periods will be devoted to reviewing and discussing translations which
students will have prepared at home. Enrolled graduate students will be
assigned additional readings and will meet with me individually and in
small groups to discuss bibliographic and other resources for pursuing
Anglo-Saxon studies, theoretical approaches to the period’s literature,
and their own research interests.
HAL MOMMA, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
Old English Literature and Culture
Undergraduate Course
HAL MOMMA, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
Institutions and Speech Act in
Early Medieval English Literature
Graduate Course
Although the system of writing was introduced to England from the Continent in the sixth century along with Christianity, English society retained its earlier oral characteristics throughout the early medieval period. Even when the vernacular was employed in writing, texts thus produced often exhibited what might be called residual orality. To take Beowulf for an example, this Old English heroic poem famously begins with the narrator's address to the imagined audience (hwæt 'listen!') and the establishment of performative space by identifying the narrator and the audience collectively as "we."
Accordingly, this course will examine a variety of texts to consider how orality and speech act at large played a role in both constructing and representing various institutions in early medieval England. Among the genres to be covered are religious writing (e.g. prayers, hymns, homilies, liturgical and penitential texts), legal documents (e.g. wills, pledges, orders, prohibitions), and poetic composition (e.g. elegies, riddles, wisdom poems, and "authored" poems), and dedicated treatises (e.g. encomia, lives of saints).
Moreover, texts will be considered within their immediate contexts, since medieval manuscripts were not so much portable pieces of universal knowledge as witnesses of performance each bound to a specific time and place. Of particular interest is the compilation of anthologies such as the Exeter Book, a poetic codex that contains elegies like The Seafarer and The Wanderer, almost all of the extant Old English riddles, and signed poems of Cynewulf. We will also examine composite manuscripts associated with monasteries or convents: for instance, Cotton Tiberius A.iii is a miscellany containing interlinear glosses to the Rule of St. Benedict, a glossed Latin dialogue known as Ælfric's Colloquy, and various prayers, homilies, prognostics, and calendars.
Additional reading material will include speech act theory such as Austin's How to Do Things with Words as well as other linguistic and sociolinguistic theories. We will also read publications on oral theory including Amodio's Writing the Oral Tradition.
There is no prerequisite for the course, although some knowledge of medieval English and Latin would be a plus. There will be some instruction in reading Old and early Middle English.
SPRING
2009
STACY KLEIN, RUTGERS UNIVERSITY
Old English Language and Literature
(grad/undergrad)
This course is designed to give students with no previous knowledge of Old English the basic skills necessary to read and interpret Old English texts. We will examine a variety of poetic and prose writings, including Old English alliterative shorter poems dealing with exile, gender roles, and early medieval cults of the cross; chronicles and historical narratives designed to construct specific ideas about the past and historical memory; and excerpts from the growing body of vernacular religious writings produced for an Anglo-Saxon populace that, according to some monks, was becoming increasingly illiterate. Throughout the course, attention will be given to Old English pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary, and most of the individual class periods will be devoted to reviewing and discussing translations which students will have prepared at home. Enrolled graduate students will be asked to meet with me both individually and in small groups to discuss bibliographic and other resources for pursuing Anglo-Saxon studies, theoretical approaches to the period’s literature, and their own research interests.
HARUKO MOMMA, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
G41.2044: Development of the English Language: Language, Culture and Society
(Time: Monday, 3.30-5.30 PM)
(grad)
This course will consider various socio-cultural issues that involve the question of language. Topics will include language and identity; issues of gender and class; diglossia, heteroglossia, and multilingualism; dialects and standardization; orality and literacy; and the production of language objects (inscriptions, manuscripts, print, etc). Weekly reading will center around these themes, and discussion will be based on case studies encompassing various historical periods (medieval through contemporary) and diverse geographical periods (transatlantic to postcolonial). There will be introductions to linguistic terms and concepts that are essential to the consideration of the topics.
STACY KLEIN, RUTGERS UNIVERSITY
350:532: Feminist Perspectives, Medieval Interventions
(grad)
In a recent collection of essays, Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century, Misha Kavka and Judith Butler call for a “return to history” as one, and perhaps the only, viable direction for the energies of feminism and feminist theory in the new millennium.
Following the lead of Kavka, Butler, and many others, this course takes up that call in two very different ways: by examining the development of a set of issues that have proven central within modern feminism’s own history, and by putting feminism in conversation with texts and cultural practices from the medieval past. We will be concerned to trace the changing contours of a set of debated issues that have structured feminism since the 1960's, and then to consider how medieval literary and cultural efforts to grapple with these issues (or versions of them) may help us to see them in a new light. Issues to be considered include: maternity and the problem of family; sex work, prostitution, and commercial uses of the female body; sexual difference; woman and representation; femininity and faith; and women and militancy/peace. At each step we will pair contemporary theoretical work on the issue under consideration with medieval literary texts that corroborate or complicate modern views. Thus after reading the wide array of feminist responses to prostitution and sex work (e.g., Dworkin, Walkowitz, Rubin, Rapp, Nagle, Zatz, Wardlow), we will study medieval reformed prostitute saints’ lives (e.g., Thais, Mary Magdalene, Mary of Egypt) and consider whether and how medieval “whoring” might allow us to rethink questions of agency, communal property, and the eroticization of sex that have figured centrally in feminist debates on prostitution. We will consider feminist theologians’ efforts to reread scripture and re-envision the male godhead in the light of medieval women’s mystical writings such as The Book of Margery Kempe and the Showings of Julian of Norwich. Other pairings may include the Pearl-poet’s meditation on the body of a dead girl for our section on gender and representation (along with Spivak, Zizek, Lacan, Chow); and vernacular family romances along with feminist debates on maternity (Chodorow, Irigaray, Ruddick). By the end of the course students can expect to have gained a better understanding of the history of modern feminism, a stronger idea of how one might go about studying “gender issues” in pre-modern literature, and some sense of how contemporary feminist theory and medieval studies might be put in productive dialogue. This course thus continually mediates between historical specificity and modern relevance, asking both how sex, gender, and the “woman question” figured in the Middle Ages and also what medieval texts and a return to history might have to offer contemporary feminism. No previous background in medieval literature is required and all texts will be available in modern English translation. However, some course time will be reserved for introducing students to (or increasing their facility with) Old and Middle English.
Primary texts may include Augustine’s Confessions, Beowulf, the anonymous Old English Life of Mary of Egypt, Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, the Romance of the Rose, Pearl, English family romances, The Showings of Julian of Norwich, The Book of Margery Kempe, Paston Letters. Theoretical readings will be drawn from the work of Judith Butler, Caroline Bynum, Rey Chow, Jacques Derrida, Caroline Dinshaw, Elisabeth Shussler Fiorenza, Allen Frantzen, Amy Hollywood, and many others.
Requirements: two short papers (10 pp. each) or one longer paper (20-25 pp.), attendance, participation, and brief class presentations.
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